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The Crisis of Modernity: Realism and the

Postcolonial Indian Novel

Sourit Bhattacharya

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary

Studies

University of Warwick

Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

April 2017

ii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii

Declaration v

Abstract vi

Epigraph 1

Chapter 1: Postcolonial Modernity and ‘Crisis Realism’ 2

Modernisation, Modernity, and Literary Form 3

Historical Event and Crisis 12

Form and Mode: Framing Crisis Realism 18

Chapter 2: Disaster and Realism: The Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine 32

Disaster, Famine, and Realism 35

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! 43

Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve 61

Amalendu Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne 69

Chapter 3: During and after the Naxalbari Movement: Of Critical Irrealism 87

The Naxalbari Movement, Representation, and Critical Irrealism 88

Mahasweta Devi’s Naxalite Novels and the Quest Mode 98

Linear Plot and Non-Linear Action Time: Dream, Dialogue, and Memory 101

The Interventionist Narrator and the Non-Death of the Insurgent 122

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Urban Fantastic Tales 135

Harbart and Spatial Unevenness 142

Kāngāl Mālshāt and Filth 156

Chapter 4: Writing the Indian Emergency: Realisms Without, Above, and Below 171

The Emergency: Authoritarianism, Violence, and Representation 173

Magic, Grotesquery, and Myth, or Realism from Without 184

Critical Realism I, or Realism from Above 202

Critical Realism II, or Realism from Below 221

Conclusion 243

Bibliography 250

iii

Acknowledgements

As many will concur, a doctoral thesis is never a piece of individual academic work.

People, objects, media, as well as feelings, sensations, even periods of no sensation,

etc. – all play their parts. Let me acknowledge the pluralistic nature of this thesis by

first thanking my supervisors, Neil Lazarus and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee. When I

began working on this thesis, I had a feeling that this was going to be a challenging

task. This turned out to be so true over the last three and a half years. Neil and Pablo

have systematically taken my assumptions and conclusions to task, and have brought

out in the open the fundamental gaps and blind spots in my thoughts. Their insights,

rigour, and fellowship have redeemed me and the thesis. The thesis would not be what

it is today without them, but, of course, all errors in thought and in writing are entirely

mine. I would also like to take this occasion to thank my examiners, Priyamvada Gopal

and Graeme Macdonald, for reading the thesis.

My sincere thanks also go to the University of Warwick Library, the British

Library, and the Bodleian Library at Oxford; to Kate Courage, Warwick English’s

Academic Support Librarian, who has been very supportive of my project and

requirements; I also thank Warwick’s Chancellor’s International Scholarship which

made it possible for me to do this Ph.D.; thanks also to Maureen Freely for her support

at various stages.

Let me also thank a number of good people I have met in and around Warwick,

who have offered me at times their invaluable academic insights, and at other times

the much needed food- and talk-breaks from studies and from the emotional

entrapments of isolation and depression in this foreign country. Alphabetically with

their surnames: Desiree Arbo, Somak Biswas, Mayur Bommai, Shrikant Botre, Senjuti

Chakraborti, Lucio De Capitani, Wu Dee, Miriam Grinberg, Demet Intepe, James

Koh, Waiyee Loh, Angus Love, Jenny Mak, Jack McGowan, Sayali Mhatre, Chiaki

Ohashi, Divya Rao, Emanuelle Santos, Aditya Sarkar, Martin Schauss, Kamalika

Sengupta, JungJu Shin, Michael Tsang, Alex Tse, and George Ttoouli and Rashmi

Varma. Special thanks to Priyanka Basu who helped me with documents, good food

and good company in London. Also special thanks to my Leeds friends, Saira Dogra

iv

and Jivitesh Vashisth for their hospitality, affection, and companionship. Special

thanks also to Lara Choksey and Joseph Shafer – I have had some very good time with

them, discussing politics, writing, activism, as well as sharing comradely joys of

academic failure.

I want to also acknowledge my immense debt to the various South Asian

groceries and restaurants in Coventry, Leamington Spa, Birmingham, and London’s

Brick Lane, which have literally kept me alive. And also, if I am allowed, gratitude to

my ol’ laptop which struggled through and survived the years as I did.

Finally, a few close people. I would like to thank my extended family, my

grandmother (the late Thakuma), my uncles (Jethu and the late Mejho Jethu, who

loved me so much), aunts and cousins (Boroma, Mejhoma, Dadan, Fuldi, Chhordi,

and my little sister, Payel), my elder brother (Dada) and his wife. My special thanks

also to my parents-in-law (Baba-Maa) and my brother in law (Bhai). Their blessings

and love enrich me every day. Thanks also to my long-time friend Arka

Chattopadhyay, whose scholarship and solidarity have motivated me in so many ways;

to Anuparna Mukherjee, for her friendship and her faith in my work; and to my

childhood friends. Chirantan Kar and Rajasree Das for the much needed laughter.

No higher study, let alone a Ph.D. in a foreign country, would have been

possible without the support that I have received from my parents. I do not know how

they manage to place so much faith in me. I still remember as I was boarding the taxi

for the flight to Britain for the first time, my parents were unsure whether I would be

able to talk to them for over a year. Strange is the nature of parental love. No thanks

are enough here.

For Arunima, whom I have known for more than a decade now, and who is

more a genuine friend than a wife and partner, I have only love and gratitude. There

have been occasions when I have wanted to abandon literary studies in order to do

something ‘more’ meaningful. She has managed to convince me every time, through

her deep interest in literature and the arts and through her critical faculties, that a lot

can be done through and with literature. This thesis is for my parents and for Arunima.

v

Declaration and Inclusion of Material from a Prior Thesis

I declare that the research presented in this thesis is entirely my own work and has not

been submitted for a degree at another university.

Earlier versions of sections of this thesis have appeared in a journal and in an

edited book: ‘Colonial Governance, Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani

Bhattacharya’s Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine’, ARIEL: A Review of International

English Literature, 47.4 (2016), 45-70; and ‘The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity:

Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction’, in Postcolonial Urban

Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature, ed. by Madhurima Chakraborty and

Umme Al-wazadi (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 39-56. My thanks to the editors and

anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to the drafts.

vi

Abstract

This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the

nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as

the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given

rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds

of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot,

state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-

44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency

(1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event

and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It

claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic

through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form

to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events.

However, because the nature, form, and orientation of these events are different, their

realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation. These stylistic shifts are shaped

primarily by the writers’ adapting of various literary modes to the specific

requirements (i.e. the historical context). Modes are chosen to represent and historicise

the specific character and appearance of an event. In order to represent the Bengal

famine, the thesis argues, Bhabani Bhattacharya and Amalendu Chakraborty use

analytical-affective and metafictional modes, while Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun

Bhattacharya deploy quest and urban fantastic modes to register the Naxalbari

Movement and its aftermath. For the Emergency, writers such as Salman Rushdie, O.

V. Vijayan, and Arun Joshi use magical, grotesque and mythical modes, and

Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry employ critical realist modes, defined sharply

by the writers’ class- and caste-based perspectives. These modes shape the realisms in

the respective texts and transform realist literary form into a highly experimental and

heterogeneous matter. Contrary to the prevailing academic belief that modernity

breeds modernism, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial Indian context, the

conditions of modernity have provoked a historically conscious, experimental, and

modernistic form of ‘crisis realism’

1

Epigraph

Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence; every form

restores the absurd to its proper place as the vehicle, the necessary condition of

meaning. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

If we approach details too closely and fail to open them up for critical inspection, we

will indeed find ourselves in the proverbial situation of not seeing the wood for the

trees. On the other hand, if we distance ourselves too much, we shall be unable to

grasp history because the categories we use themselves become excessively magnified

to the point where they become problematic and fail to do justice to their material.

Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom

Where were the research analysts of the future who would salvage the truth from the

mountains of untruths and set the records straight? There were too many truths in the

world distorted into lies in the records through the conspiracy of the administration.

Isn’t there daily assassination of truths going on continuously? Mahasweta Devi,

Bashai Tudu

It would be more accurate to maintain that postcolonial studies, in its prevailing and

consolidated aspect at least, has been premised on a distinctive and conjuncturally

determined set of assumptions, concepts, theories, and methods that have not only not

been adequate to their putative object – the ‘postcolonial world’ – but have served

fairly systematically to mystify it. […] What is required instead, it seems to me, is a

new ‘history of the present’ – a new reading, above all of the second half of the

twentieth century, liberated from the dead weight both of the cold war and of ‘Third-

Worldism’ as its compensatory alternative. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial

Unconscious.

2

CHAPTER ONE

Postcolonial Modernity and ‘Crisis Realism’

On August 15, 1947, India gained formal independence from British colonial rule. On

the eve of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would soon be India’s first Prime

Minister, stated in a now famous speech: ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with

destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in

full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world

sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’.1 However, the country’s awakening from

slumber, from the long histories of colonialism and imperialist subjection to socio-

economic and ideological freedom was not and could not be a smooth one.2 The

decade of the 1940s saw several enormous moments of national crisis – the Second

World War, the 1943-1944 Bengal famine, the communal riots in 1946-1947, the 1946

naval mutiny in Bombay, to name a few. The year of independence was bloodied with

gruesome violence due to the partition of the colony into two countries, India and

Pakistan. In the decades that followed, India would have wars with China and

Pakistan, would encounter wide internal discontent surrounding language and caste

issues, and agitations from peasants, students and the working classes on issues of

food shortage, unemployment, inflation, and poverty. In the 1970s, these crisis

conditions would be aggravated by a corrupt Congress stewardship led by Indira

Gandhi, which, in order to save its own image and political priorities, would declare a

state of internal emergency in the name of safeguarding democracy from chaos. The

present thesis looks at the turbulent period of the first thirty years of Indian history

after independence, between 1947 and 1977. It does not read these years as isolated

from what came before because of the historical rupture of independence. To the

contrary, it seeks to understand how the economic and political crisis in the late-

colonial period shaped the social conditions and cultural values in the postcolonial

aftermath. It reads late-colonial as a temporal marker denoting roughly the second

1 Nehru, ‘A Tryst with Destiny’, in Nehru: The First Sixty Years Vol II, ed. by Dorothy Norman (New

York: John Day, 1965), p. 336. 2 Although it is only from a particular (class-, caste-, and gender-inflected) position that the country can

be said to be slumbering at all.

3

quarter of the twentieth century, shortly before the formal ending of colonialism.

Although independence is the nominal break between the late-colonial and the

postcolonial, the thesis argues through a reading of a longer framework of historical

crises, structures of domination, and acts of resistance that there is hardly a notable

conceptual or categorical break there. Rather, this whole period appears as a time of

crisis-in-continuity.3 My arguments are based on three catastrophic events: the 1943-

1944 Bengal famine, the tribal-peasant Naxalbari movement (1967-1972), and the

state of emergency (1975-1977).

Modernisation, Modernity, and Literary Form

These events seem to be categorically different – environmental, political, and

constitutional. I will however show that they are all linked with the crises in

agriculture, food production, and industry resulting from specific issues in

modernisation and development in the colony. The process of modernisation began,

Sumit Sarkar notes in Modern India (1983),4 in the nineteenth century, as the British

started to systematically ‘underdevelop’ India through deindustrialisation and the

commercialisation of agriculture in order to turn the flourishing world market of cotton

into a raw material for export to Britain.5 After Britain’s restriction on export to India

in 1843, factory-machines for cotton production were imported, and agriculture was

further commercialised with irrigation, railways, and the telegraph. In a recent study,

Bishnupriya Gupta argues that although there was commercialisation of agriculture,

irrigation was limited to particular sectors. It did not help the development of the

agricultural sector as a whole. The turn to cash-crop production included priorities

given to tea, jute, coal, and other profitable resources over those of the food-grains.6

And, as economic historians such as Amiya Bagchi have argued, there was a strong

case of racial discrimination in colonial policy, where the native industrial class’s

entry into the production market was limited. Bagchi also reasons that the shift away

3 However, the important discontinuities, such as Ambedkar’s making of the constitution etc., need to

be acknowledged as well. 4 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947 (London: Macmillan, 1989). 5 Sarkar writes, ‘By the second half of the nineteenth century, British business houses were in virtual

control of the overseas trade, shipping and insurance of the country. So the bulk of the profits from the

export boom was appropriated by foreign forms and went out of the country as foreign leakage’, p. 31. 6 Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The Rise of Modern Industry in Colonial India’, in A New Economic History of

Colonial India, ed. by Latika Chaudhary, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy

(London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 67-83 (pp. 75-81).

4

from manufacturing (handicrafts and small-scale industries) to agriculture and cash-

crops brought down India’s GDP and curbed its growth.7 The modernisation of

industries and agriculture contributed significantly to an unequal and uneven system

of growth that made India, though a stable economy even during the mid-twentieth

century, into an irredeemably poor one. The most obvious consequences could be seen

in a number of disasters in the late nineteenth century. As Sarkar writes, ‘The colonial

structure, as a whole […] constituted a “built-in-depressor” for India’s agrarian

economy. The most obvious indication of this lay in the series of disastrous famines,

in the 1870s and again in the late 1890s, the latter wave coinciding with the ravages

of plague – while twenty years later even influenza managed to kill off millions’.8

What these studies indicate is that colonial modernisation always and by

definition occurs in the ‘crisis’ mode. The Bengal famine, which I will discuss in

Chapter Two, has direct links with the changes in agricultural production, the drive

for modernisation and industrialisation, and profit-oriented economy in the colony.

The Second World War, accompanied by climactic conditions, corruption among

traders, and the operation of speculative capital, aggravated the situation. The post-

famine society saw increasing deprivation, oppression, and eviction of the peasants by

the landed elite in Bengal and around. This resulted in the Tebhaga Movement (1946)

in Bengal, which was not an isolated act, but was part of a series of social movements

in late-colonial India.9 Tebhaga was followed by a longer armed struggle by the

peasants of Andhra Pradesh against the Nizam and the Indian armed forces, known as

the Telangana Uprising (1947-1952). The continual nature of these movements, and

the fact that the Telangana Uprising started in the same year as India’s independence,

7 Amiya Bagchi, ‘De-industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical

Implications’, Journal of Development Studies, 12.2 (1976), 135-64; see also: Raghabendra

Chattopadhyay, ‘De-industrialisation in India Reconsidered’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10.12

(1975), 523-53; Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Incorporation of Indian Subcontinent into Capitalist World-

Economy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 21.4 (1986), PE28–PE39. For a reading in the Global South

context, see Andre Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (London:

Macmillan, 1978), especially pp. 140-71. Bagchi’s theory supports Dadabhai Naoroji’s thesis of the

‘drain of wealth’ from India. Naoroji has shown through a reading of John Stuart Mill how British

merchants systematised an urban-based economy in which the wealth (i.e. revenues) from the rural

parts of India was supplied to the metropolitan centres of Britain. See Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and

Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901). 8 Sarkar, Modern India, p. 36. 9 As Sarkar has noted, there were a number of social movements ‘from below’ by tribals, peasants,

artisans, fishermen, etc., in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the ‘disastrous’

social conditions in the rural world. The Tebhaga was the result of these various resistance movements

produced by the specific colonial-historical conjunctures. Ibid, p. 43-62.

5

only serve to show that there was no rupture or break, or no awakening from slumber

for those on the lowest tier in the socio-economic ladder. These insurgencies were

organised by the peasants’ and workers’ fronts of the Communist Party, which was

also instrumental in organising food movements in the cities in late 1950s and early

1960s. The crises in food and agriculture were escalated by inflation. Jawaharlal

Nehru’s death and Indira Gandhi’s rise to power in the mid-1960s marked a shift in

politics, especially in her heavy commercialisation of agriculture through the Green

Revolution project which had the effect of making already rich farmers even richer.

Gandhi’s economic reforms failed to address the wide uneven development in rural

India, the unending peasant oppression, the new nexus between landed elite, political

heads, and the police, etc. As the old problems of deprivation and oppression

continued, peasants in Naxalbari rose in arms in 1967. The uprising continued for five

years until brutally crushed by the state. Soon, Gandhi, unable to tackle the crisis in

agriculture, employment, inflation, and economy, and fearful of the rising

dissatisfaction with her government declared a state of emergency to coercively

‘discipline’ the postcolonial public and to pave the way for neo-colonialism in the

name of development. Indian postcolonial democracy now entered a new phase of

state authoritarianism and regimentation. Ranajit Guha has published a fiercely critical

essay on the emergency measures. In an argument similar to what Frantz Fanon wrote

in ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in the late 1950s, Guha contends that true

democracy never actually existed in India because decolonisation did not destroy the

old colonial state, but only transferred interest and power from the British ruling

bodies to the Indian ruling classes.10 The artificial and state-imposed version of

democracy lost credibility when, five years after the liberation of India from colonial

rule, the Nehruvian government brutally crushed a peasant movement which

demanded landholding and better crop share rights in Telangana. The dead body of

democracy was clearly buried in the state’s autocratic-repressive acts in the Naxalbari

tribal-peasant uprising. The emergency, thus, was not a radical break from a culture

of democracy, as the passive opposition would say: ‘It is [rather] the realization by the

ruling classes, acting through the government of the day, of the full potential of the

10 Ranajit Guha, ‘Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 6.1

(1976), 39-53 (p. 40); for Fanon, see The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, trans. by Constance Farrington

(London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 119-65.

6

violence of a state which they had themselves conceived of and set up as hostile to

democracy’.11

These aspects of crisis, violence, and resistance, produced by capitalist

modernisation and bourgeois political dominance in the (post)colony, are read here as

the social condition of modernity in (post)colonial India. These conditions were

reflected widely in Indian novels from the late 1920s onwards.12 Kalindi Charan

Panigrahi’s Oriya Matira Manisa (Man of the Soil, 1931), Tarashankar

Bandyopadhyay’s Bangla Chaitali Ghurni (The Whirlwind, 1932), Nanak Singh’s

Punjabi Chitta Lahu (White Blood, 1932), A. Bapiraju’s Telugu Narayana Rao

(Narayana Rao, 1934), Gajanan T. Madkholkar’s Marathi Muktatma (Free Soul,

1936), Premchand’s Hindi Godaan (The Gift of A Cow, 1936), and Raja Rao’s English

Kanthapura (1938), variously narrate the rapid rise of the manufacturing and steel

industries in rural areas, the destruction of the handicraft industry and the debilitating

agricultural relations, the large migration of rural workers to the city, the native

bourgeois elite’s exploitation of the peasants, the resistance of the peasants and the

subaltern populations, the tension of a looming World War, the general social crisis

and the nationalist agitations under Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and so on.13

These conditions also influence the formal and structural elements of the narratives:

there are uses of archaic cultural forms, such as the jatra or the kathakata alongside

modern and contemporary ones in terms of plot development and characterisation,

uses of parallel temporal scales, problematic spatial locations of the narrators, aspects

of popular faith in the supernatural and the mythological alongside emerging features

of a rationalised subject, and so on.14 In novels that register the catastrophic events

such as the famine or the communal riots, there are further developments in form and

style. Novels about the 1943 Bengal famine, by Bhabani Bhattacharya, Manik

Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, or Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay,

11 Guha, ‘Democracy’, p. 44. 12 This is not exclusive to novels as a genre. My focus remains mainly on novels for the genre’s

historical link with capitalism and novelistic realism’s capacity to render complex social conditions

produced by a society’s historical transition to (colonial) capitalism. 13 For a reading on this, see Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature, 1911-1956: Struggle for

Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2015), pp. 276-300. 14 For a reading on this, see Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India, ed. by Satya

P. Mohanty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). However, I think Mohanty uncritically dismisses

Jameson’s views on a singular but uneven/unequal modernity for an argument on alternative/indigenous

modernity. See his introduction, especially, pp. 4-6.

7

demonstrate wide improvisation in narrative form in order to represent the immensity

of horror in a society already in deep turmoil as a result of the Second World War and

the anti-colonial agitations. In these novels, there are scenes of emaciated hungry

people wailing for rice, dying carelessly on the streets, seizing food from their

offspring and from animals; scenes of rape and prostitution, of corruption among

traders, and of deep entrenchment in class; and scenes of exhibitionism of wealth by

the bourgeoisie. The question of how to represent this terrible period of crisis and

suffering affected the contemporary writer. The novels, especially those written by

socially committed writers (proletarian, working-class, and activist writers, as well as

writers critical about the socio-economic exploitation of the poor and the vulnerable),

experiment with specific modes, through which they attempt to balance the

requirements of the age: to document the current social condition, to analyse the

factors responsible for the disaster, and to use literature as a therapy/reflection for the

pain and suffering of the people. It is from this sense of necessity and urgency that

Bhabani Bhattacharya wrote the novel, So Many Hungers!. Published in 1947, just a

month after independence, the novel is deeply analytical in mode, anti-colonial and

anti-imperialist in nature, and highly sentimental and emotional on occasion. There

are episodes of an ethnographic-documentary nature while at the same time, the

language sometimes assumes a melodramatic tone. Bhattacharya ends his novel with

a vision of a future utopian socialist transformation. This analytical-affective mode,

however, is not predominant among other writers. Bhattacharya’s contemporaries use

modes that are not historical-analytical or that do not end with an optimistic vision of

a transformative future. The choice of modes changes as the famine transforms into

chronic malnutrition and starvation in the postcolonial rural society. Amalendu

Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne (1982; In Search of Famine) adopts a metafictional

mode and uses various interruptive devices such as interior monologues, asides, and

anecdotes. Both of these novels are realist, especially in the way that they ‘register’

the ‘world’ in their ‘works’ and employ an analytical-historical style, but the modes

give new shapes to the writings, making their realisms increasingly dynamic,

experimental and ‘modernistic’. These mutations and strategies are conventionally

read in academic circles as technical shortcomings or structural weaknesses within the

realist form. My contention here is that the specific crisis conjunctures of catastrophic

events require a set of innovative and radical aesthetic techniques, mutations, and

strategies within realist writing. Rather than structural weaknesses, the experimental

8

modes should be understood as integral features of a historically conscious crisis

narrative. The novels, in forging innovations in the modes of realism, render the

categorical distinctions between literary realism and modernism inappropriate and

unprofitable, and project the aesthetic category of modernism as constituting

stylistically the historical-social field of ‘crisis realism’. It will be useful to frame my

discussion of crisis and event, and on realism and modernism, through a reading of

modernity in Fredric Jameson’s work.15

In A Singular Modernity (2005), Jameson defines the links between

modernisation, modernity and modernism: modernity is ‘the new historical situation,

modernization [i]s the process whereby we get there, and modernism [i]s a reaction to

that situation and that process alike, a reaction that can be aesthetic and philosophical-

ideological’.16 Modernity as a historical situation is ‘new’ because older feudal and

tribal economic modes have been dismantled, because methods of capitalist

accumulation never seen before have arisen, and because innovations in technology

and machinery have emerged. Here, Jameson is careful enough to use the word

‘situation’ in a Sartrean sense to suggest the contingency and limits of a particular

situation and the desire to break free from the dominant frameworks and to achieve

social freedom.17 Modernity as a historical situation retains within its framework this

15 There have been studies on colonial modernity in India, notably by Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta

Kaviraj, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. But in their constitutive focus on the urban middle class, they do not

always pay attention to capitalism’s shaping of the conditions of colonial modernity, and more

specifically, about the nexus between imperialism, modernisation, and modernity in the rural-peripheral

context – which is the focus area of my thesis. See Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Kuala Lampur:

Vinlin Press, 1997); Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Modernity and Politics in India’, Daedalus 129.1 (2000), 137-

62; Dipesh Chakraborty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 37-46. A more theoretically cogent argument on the

links between colonialism and modernity in the Indian context can be found in Gurminder K. Bhambra,

Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007), especially pp. 15-32, pp. 56-83. 16 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2005), p. 99. 17 Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that one does not choose not to have freedom. Man is

‘condemned to be free’ (p. 449). There are no limits to this freedom. But the outer world can never

produce an action by itself. Man has to envision an alternative and to act upon the desire for change.

Sartre calls freedom in the outer world as ‘being-in-itself’, and the desire to fix a limit and to overcome

it as a ‘situation’ or a ‘being-for-itself’. He writes: ‘There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a

resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determinism, of necessity lose

all meaning’ (p. 483). He also points out that this desire ‘to be free’ should not be confused with one’s

subjective wishes. Only in extreme circumstances (Sartre was writing this work as France was occupied

by Nazi Germany during the Second World War) can people make significant moral choices and do a

fuller use of freedom. I think this applies reasonably to the anti-colonial context, especially the acts of

wrestling social freedom both from the imposing elements of colonial-capitalist modernity and from

the native bourgeois dominance of class and culture. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An

Essay on the Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1969).

9

dialectic of dominance and resistance, and is not to be understood in liberal terms, as

‘progress’. Jameson is also careful to argue that modernism is a reaction to both this

contingency and the historical process. But from his readings it appears that realism is

capable of doing everything that he finds in modernism; in other words, realism is

itself a modernist mode. Jameson recognises the blurred distinctions between realism

and modernism. Every modernism tries to address the social world in idioms and

techniques that have not been used before, and this is exactly what every new realism

does:

Each realism is also by definition new: and aims at conquering a whole new

area of content for its representation. Each wishes to annex what has not yet

been represented, what has not yet ever been named or found its voice (and

this is why throughout and beyond the age of modernism, there are still new

and vibrant realisms to be heard and to be recognized, in parts of the world and

areas of social totality into which representation has not yet penetrated). This

is to say not only that each new realism arises out of dissatisfaction with the

limits of the realisms that preceded it, but also and more fundamentally that

realism itself in general shares precisely that dynamic of innovation we

ascribed to modernism as its uniquely distinguishing feature.18

However, Jameson does not go on to discuss the complexities and innovations within

realism(s). Modernism appears to be the philosophical-aesthetic response to the

conditions of modernity. Since realism is primarily an epistemological category and

modernism primarily an aesthetic category, these two are incommensurable and ‘the

attempt to combine the two into a single master narrative must therefore necessarily

fail’.19 What I will seek to do in this thesis is not to combine these categories, but to

point out the experimental modes of realism that are ‘recognisably’ modernist,

meaning that realist narratives are able to capture the complex dialectical relations of

the ‘situation and [the] process’ of modernisation. This can be understood if we read

historical events and historical crisis dialectically. I will do this after elucidating how

my use of these terms differs from Jameson’s notions of ‘break’ and ‘continuity’.

At an early point in his book, Jameson defines break and continuity as two-

fold movements sharing a dialectical relation. Historical continuity is the ‘insistent

and unwavering focus on the seamless passage from past to present [which] slowly

18 Ibid, p. 123. 19 Ibid, p. 124.

10

turns into a consciousness of a radical break; while at the same time the enforced

attention to a break gradually turns the latter into a period in its own right’.20 The

consciousness of continuity gives birth to the radical consciousness of breaks and

consequently of periodisation. Jameson here has a longer history in mind, in which he

finds two radical breaks, namely, the European Renaissance with its pre-modernity

and the ancients with their pre-modernity. The ancients here refer to the Roman

tradition, from which ‘the modern conception of abstraction and of philosophy itself,

along with a certain conception of history as something distinct from the chronicle,

first appear’. The Renaissance is the break in which ‘a certain instauration of

“modernity”’ begins to appear as ‘the unmarked other of a present felt to be the

reinvention of the older or first modernity’.21 What marks this second break and the

consequent periodisation is the capitalist mode of production, which proceeds to

subsume historical differences under a unilateral logic of global accumulation. For

Jameson, these two breaks are not gaps or discontinuities in the Foucauldian epistemic

sense. These are new paradigms that have dissevered most of their connections from

previous ones. He writes:

[F]or if the break is initially characterized as a perturbation of causality as such,

as the severance of the threads, as the moment in which the continuities of an

older social and cultural logic come to an incomprehensible end and find

themselves displaced by a logic and form of causality not active in the older

system, then the renewed and mesmerized contemplation of the moment of

such a break, as it begins to detect causalities and conferences not previously

visible to the naked eye is bound to expand that break into a period in its own

right.22

In this longue durée framework, Jameson finds aesthetic modes to be ‘transitional’ in

character. Speaking mainly of the capitalist mode of production, he writes that a new

economic mode results in a new historical consciousness and a new temporality. But

very much like the paradigmatic nature of economic modes, where the existence of

other modes either lies hidden or is at their nascent stage, aesthetic modes also contain

many temporalities. Taking after Étienne Balibar, Jameson posits that in periods of

great economic and social transition, these different temporalities reveal their co-

existence in the form of differential aesthetic techniques, which constitute the axis of

20 Ibid, p. 24. 21 Ibid, pp. 26-27. 22 Ibid, p. 27.

11

modernism.23 My point here is that, moments of extreme historical crisis – or ‘events’

in their historical/sociological meaning – such as famines, social movements, brief

dictatorial regimes, or coups, do not necessarily suggest a constitutive break or result

in a historical consciousness formative for a new period. However, these events do

give birth to new aesthetic modes in order to adequately represent the specificities of

the historical crises, conjunctures, and contexts. Indeed, as I will show, sometimes

multiple modes – even ones that seem contradictory on the surface, such as the gothic

and the social realist – are juxtaposed in a literary work which is based on a

catastrophic crisis and is predominantly realist in form. The general condition of crisis,

produced by historical/global factors or by neo-colonialism in India, seems to call for

a general realist framework, while the specific/local conjuncture of a crisis like famine

or political uprising appears to inspire the use of specific modes.

This reading, based on crisis and event, is important for the context of my

thesis for two main reasons. First, unlike Jameson’s longue durée framework, I am

focusing on a shorter time frame, namely, the late-colonial period. While the crisis in

Indian agriculture, as I have argued above, had a long history of British

commercialisation, events like the famine or the political uprising were conditioned

and shaped significantly by the immediate and escalating crises in politics and history,

such as the Second World War (for the Bengal famine), militant Leftism (for the

Naxalbari movement), and the rise of an opposition coalition party (for the

emergency). Even if we view this period of forty-odd years in terms of the long

twentieth century, the historical conditions of imperialism, capitalism, and

colonialism, and the acts and practices of political resistance to both the British and

the bourgeois native, are so overpowering that the entire (post)colonial time frame can

together be called a break and one long period in Jamesonian terms.24 We will need

an elaborated theorisation to understand the historical specificities and crisis

conjunctures of the (post)colonial period. Second, although all these catastrophic

events share a common link in food and agricultural crises, they are also different from

each other in type, nature, and character. A famine or starvation may have led to a

23 ‘[O]ne of the great themes which has conventionally been identified as a dominant in literary

modernism – namely temporality itself […] is very precisely a mode in which this transitional economic

structure of incomplete capitalism can be registered and identified as such’. Ibid, p. 142. 24 Indian history has long been periodised in terms of the breaks manufactured by different dominant

Indian and foreign empires.

12

peasant uprising, which may then have been followed by repressive state action, but

these are all constitutively different kinds of events. A famine and an agrarian-based

political uprising may include wide scenes of violence, but the immediacy and

immensity of a famine are not comparable to the long deprivation, dispossession, and

violence against peasants by the landed elite, or to the violence produced by guerrilla

warfare waged by tribal-peasants. These different events ask for different modes of

expression, which in turn shape the form of realist representations. I will argue that

these culturally specific modes, in their late-colonial South Asian/Indian context at

least, are able to capture the tensions between the global and the local, between the

European-colonialist shaping of uneven modernity and the national/specific responses

to it, between domination and resistance. In order to understand this aesthetic-

historical matrix, we will need a theorisation of the dialectic between historical crisis

and event in the (post)colonial conjuncture.

Historical Event and Crisis

In her book Critical Events (1995), Veena Das defines events as those that share

relations with several institutions ‘moving across family, community, bureaucracy,

courts of law, the medical profession, the state and multinational corporations’, and

bring about new modes of action redefining traditional categories of knowledge

production.25 She takes from Franҫois Furet’s notion that the French Revolution was

the event par excellence as it ‘instituted a new modality of historical action which was

not inscribed into the inventory of that situation’,26 and proceeds to critically read the

events of the Partition, the Sikh militancy, the Bhopal gas disaster, and others,

focusing on the violence perpetrated on socio-economically, sexually, and religiously

marginal bodies and communities. She finds that over time, victim communities have

emerged as powerful political actors, both in terms of declaring their representative

authority over their voices and bodies through an antagonistic politics against the state,

and consolidating the community’s power through the memorialisation of the pains

and sufferings of the members.27 Das’ main interest here lies in recovering the

individual voices, which have either been maligned by the state (by professional

25 Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 6. 26 Ibid, p. 5. 27 Ibid, pp. 12-13.

13

organisations, such as the multinational company in the case of the Bhopal gas

disaster, which seek immunity from their crime), or glorified by the communities in

acts of declaring legitimacy over the pain shared by the subjects of those

communities.28 In both cases, she says, there is a misreading of pain and suffering, and

an eliding of individual, dissenting, contingent voices by viewing them as

irresponsible, accidental, or immoral. An anthropologist, Das attempts to read the

nature of irresponsibility with responsibility, and to give voice to the unheard and the

subaltern: ‘The anthropologist must appear not in the role of an observer but that of a

hearer, and the subject must correspondingly appear in the role of a speaker’ and

recover the disembodied voice.29 These ideas prompt me to understand the events from

the grounded perspective of the victim communities, and motivate me to identify and

complicate literature’s acts of giving voice to the unheard and the routinely silenced.

But a problem arises with Das’ conception of totalities and resistant practices. She

writes,

To recover such embodied narrations [voice] seems to me the only way in

which one can resist the totalizing discourses that become evident not only in

narratives of the state and narratives embedded in the professional

organization, but also in the discourses of resistance that use the vey logic of

the state which they seek to resist.30

28 The historian Shahid Amin does a similar study in Event, Metaphor, and Memory (1994). He reads

the history of a peasant riot in the Chauri Chaura village of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in 1922,

which caused Mahatma Gandhi to suspend the Civil Disobedience movement. The event was born both

of the long history of fear and hatred for the colonial masters and their symbolic-repressive machineries

(the police, the guns, and uniform, etc.) and of the immediate violent skirmishes between the armed

police and an unarmed demonstrating satyagrahi-volunteers (Gandhi’s political followers who sought

truth through nonviolence). Considered a serious flaw in the nationalist/Gandhian anti-colonial

campaign, the event was initially obliterated from the official nationalist narratives and the public

processes of memorialisation, and repurposed later as an instance of ‘politics by other means’. Amin

seeks to reconstruct this erased and maligned event through memories and cultural acts of remembrance

by the current relatives of the ‘rioters’. He traces through oral narratives, as well as through various

bureaucratic and newspaper documents and political pamphlets, how this event was related to both local

peasant practices and the imaginings of Gandhi as a messiah, and how through such acts official

nationalist narratives appropriated, displaced, and co-opted local resistant practices. An event achieves

a double meaning here, as one ‘fixed in time and also as a metaphor gathering significances outside this

time-frame’ (p. 3). This is a powerful reading, as it tries to balance the actual (official) course of the

event with the way the event was received and used in official as well as unofficial speech and writing.

At the same time, in order to emphasise the element of public memory and the localisation of the

discourse, Amin’s work, which follows a method of microhistory, is not able to tell us how this event

was connected to the current political crisis in nationalism, especially with the wide rise of native armed

struggles and ‘terroristic’ activities, and the contemporary nation-wide instances of peasant resistance

(the wider historical-metaphorical dimension of the event, so to say). See, Event, Metaphor, Memory:

Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 29 Das, Events, p. 18. 30 Ibid, p. 23.

14

By totalities, as her chapters show, she means the way the state often tries to abstract

or reify the contingent and individual cases of pain and suffering through legal and

judicial practices and through a recourse to universal humanism. ‘Discourses of

resistance’ stand for the practices, strategies, and rhetoric used by the victim

communities to appropriate the contingent cases and challenge the state. ‘A critique

of the state’, as she writes, ‘which reproduces the very logic it seeks to contest and

which exists in the same arena of historicity can do little more than mirror the state’s

structures’.31 These observations are problematic on two grounds: first, there is an a

priori understanding that all resistant practices and elements in a given community

will support the community’s statist counter-practices. Resistance structures are

considered a monolithic ideal type. To take one example from our readings, the

emergency produced two distinct narratives: one official, one-sided, statist

propaganda, and the other oppositional (political and legal narratives and social

commentaries published just after the lifting of the emergency). The latter was also

using statist discourses of meaning appropriation by declaring legitimacy on the

sufferers’ bodies (reifying their individual experiences), asking for punishment of the

culprits, and asserting justice. But in the latter group, there were also competing

narratives such as the underground newsletters, pamphlets, or journalistic criticisms.

They were opposed to the emergency since the beginning, in languages that were

either extremist or moderate, but in both cases highly self-reflexive. There were

literary and artistic cases of resistance that challenged the authoritarian regime and

questioned the validity of statist and counter-statist discourses in rendering the

constructed nature of truth. Das’ theorisation is unable to address this layered and

complex case of resistance. Secondly, totalities, as Hegel, Marx, or Lukács understood

it, do not mean an appropriation of competing voices for a statist discourse (which

sounds closer to the term totalitarian), but rather ensembles where competing,

disruptive, dominant, and residual elements constitute history and society. As we will

shortly see through Lukács, a practice of totality, for a writer, is an understanding of

the paradoxical fusion of social dissonances through a dialectic of the everyday and

the historical.32 Interestingly, Das seems to do a similar thing as she theorises pain and

31 Ibid, pp. 16-17. 32 Dialectic, as Jameson defines the term, is ‘a conceptual coordination of incommensurabilities […] a

kind of new language strategy, in which both identity and difference are given their due in advance and

15

suffering from the Wittgensteinian concept of communicability (that pain is social)

and inalienability (that pain is physical-conceptual), and adds that ‘there is no

individual ownership of pain’.33 It is through retaining the specificity of the individual

and trying to establish a community of suffering via the collectivisation of pain, that

an anthropologist, and for that matter a writer or literary critic, it seems to me, can

break open the totalities of social relationships.

Althusser’s reading of the historical event is useful for my context in

addressing this gap in Das’ theorisation. Althusser writes in the appendix of the essay,

‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ (1969):

What makes such and such event historical is not the fact that it is an event,

but precisely its insertion into forms which are themselves historical, into

forms which have nothing to do with the bad infinity which Engels retains even

when he has left the vicinity of the original model, forms which, on the

contrary, are perfectly definable and knowable (knowable, Marx insisted, and

Lenin after him, through empirical that is non-philosophical scientific

disciplines). An event falling within one of these forms, which has the

wherewithal to fall within one of these forms, which is a possible content for

one of these forms, which affects them, concerns them, reinforces or disturbs

them, which provokes them or which they provoke, or even choose or select,

that is a historical event.34

The context of this formulation arises from Althusser’s understanding of

overdetermination, which he says is present in Marx’s and Engels’ works, but which

the dogmatic ‘disciples’ have ruled out in their economism, empiricism, and

determinism. Althusser here explains the content of a letter Engels wrote to J. Bloch

in 1890, where Engels clarified that the mode of production was determinant only ‘in

the last instance’; ‘the various elements of the superstructure’ – political, religious,

juridical, legal, literary – ‘also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical

struggle, and in many cases preponderate in determining their form’.35 In the Russian

Revolution, which is his object of study, Althusser finds a principal contradiction

between forces and relations of production (a socially backward country and the

systematically played off against each other (in ways that for non- or pre-dialectical thought will seem

to break the law of non-contradiction)’. Jameson, Singular, pp. 64-65. 33 Das, Events, pp. 194-95. 34 Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, in For Marx, trans. by Ben Brewster

(London: Verso, 1990), pp. 87-128 (p. 126); emphasis in original. 35 Ibid, p. 112.

16

presence of an advanced imperialist/capitalist condition); but there are also different

conditions of existence, different circumstances, national and international in context,

‘with their own consistency and effectivity’ which ‘merge into a real unity’ in a time

of crisis and give birth to this revolutionary rupture. These ‘radically heterogeneous’

elements range from political and ideological structures to specific regional customs,

habits, national traditions, international political contexts, etc.36 They accumulate over

time and exacerbate the principal contradiction. Althusser does not see a particular

event, such as the French Revolution, as a radical break in the way Furet or Das do, as

an exception giving birth to new modes of relations and actions. For him, an event is

rather the consolidation of a crisis in various forms, their ‘overdetermined

contradiction’. Unlike in Hegel – at least as Althusser reads him37 – where the organic

totality of structures is shaped by ‘an internal principle’ or ‘abstract ideology’,38 in

Marx totality becomes a dialectic between the economic and the associated set of

structures which accumulate over time, crystallise and transform into an

overdetermined, historical event. Overdetermination becomes the ‘accumulation of

effective determinations (deriving from the superstructures and from special national

and international circumstances) on the determination in the last instance by the

economic’.39 So, the historical event that he refers to in the quote is an event because

all forms of its condition of being (base and superstructure, so to say) are

overdetermined as historical and knowable. In this, Althusser offers us a more

historically grounded definition where the event is a culmination of a series of events

(crisis-forms) that are heterogeneous and possibly antagonistic between themselves,

but which also fuse together to produce the revolutionary rupture. These various forms

of effects concern, reinforce, and provoke one another to shape the meta-narrative of

the historical event and struggle. Althusser uses the Gramscian word ‘conjuncture’ to

36 Ibid, p. 114. 37 Of course, several dialectical philosophers (from Gillian Rose to Timothy Brennan) have argued that

Althusser completely misreads Hegel on this. Indeed, Adorno gave a lecture on ‘Universal and

Particular’ around the same time as Althusser’s first publication of this essay in a Communist Party

journal. Adorno argued that the idea of a particular historical event, understood as a nodal point of

crisis in the historical process, was trendy and factual, and instead asked us to look at the Hegelian

notion of a universal history, where the particular is stored in as a negative or a ‘bad’ element. This

lecture, later published as an essay, seems to challenge Althusser in that what Althusser labours to

produce is already available to him in the dialectical tradition. But I also think that it is in Althusser’s

expression that the relations between historical events and crisis, for my context at least, appear cogent,

sharp, and enabling. For the Adorno essay, see ‘Universal and Particular’, in History and Freedom:

Lectures, 1964-1965, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), pp. 10-18. 38 Althusser, ‘Contradiction’, p. 102. 39 Ibid, p. 113.

17

remind us that these events are specific in their context, and global in their world-

historical relations and meanings.

To come back to our context, the disaster condition of the famine was affected

by other events such as the War, climactic conditions, hoarding of grain by corrupt

traders, etc. An analysis of the event must be conducted through an investigation into

how the various dimensions of the crisis of a historical conjuncture produced mini-

events, in which the possibility of the rise of a greater historical event of rupture lay

hidden. The crystallisation of a period’s historical crisis into an event has to be

understood through the event’s accumulated, layered nature. At the same time, the

form, orientation, and character of the event are also important. The Bengal famine is

an example of a disaster event. But famine as a disaster is different from other kinds

of disaster such as cholera, earthquake, and landslide. In fact, no two famines have the

same historical orientation and form. If we compare the 1943 famine with another

famine, such as the Bombay famine of 1875-1876, we can find many similarities in

the causes-and-effects due to similar historical forces, but there are also important

differences because of the different forces and relations of production and the different

evolution and adaption of historical-cultural factors. This is why this historical

investigation into the event will also need a critical reading such as Das’, where an

event’s particular nature and the formation of victim communities through resistant

acts and discursive strategies are taken into account; where the writer’s role is

understood as listening to the complex nature of pain and suffering of the

underprivileged and transforming them into speakers, giving voice to their suffering.

Novels based on crises and events, I believe, are able to address this subtle historical

link between the global and the local, between historical crisis and the accumulated

nature of an event, through their use of form and mode. They are able to respond to

the global-singular but uneven and unequal nature of modernity through their complex

interactive matrices. I will turn to these two keywords now for my argument on crisis

realism.

18

Form and Mode: Framing Crisis Realism

Form and mode are often used interchangeably in academic circles. But there is a

crucial distinction. According to Raymond Williams, form is ‘a visible or outward

shape, and an inherent shaping impulse’.40 It relates both to the external/superficial

and the essential/determining. It is through form and its mediational nature that a work

registers the world in all its complex dimensions, gives these dimensions a social

meaning, and reflects on the process of registration. Lukács thinks that form is

compositional in nature. He writes that: ‘All the fissures and rents which are inherent

in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot and

should not be disguised by compositional means’.41 Form is also deeply historical. As

Williams notes, literary form is ‘inevitably a relationship […] between social

(collective) modes and individual projects’.42 Writers adopt new forms in ‘[p]eriods

of major transition between social systems’: ‘new formal possibilities […] are

inherently possibilities of a newly shared perception, recognition, and

consciousness’.43 Mode, on the other hand, is the medium, the manner, the fashion

through which this shape is achieved. Williams in the quote above uses the phrase

‘social (collective) mode’. For him, modes are mainly genres, such as romance, epic,

tragedy, and so on, which are literary expressions of an older, heterogeneous society.

The shifting mode of economy, the birth of industrial capitalism and the bourgeois

class, and the increasing urbanisation of the rural and new coercive methods of labour

practices, make novels into an ‘individual project’, the dominant mode of the current

times. Williams uses the word ‘mode’ again to mean the ‘new mode of consciousness’

that emerges from a new mode of economic production and new forms of social and

cultural relationships.44 This reading of mode reminds me of Northrop Frye’s longue

durée understanding of the word. For Frye, the last fifteen centuries of literary

production have offered five predominant modes: myth, romance, high mimetic

(epic/tragic), low mimetic (comedy/realistic fiction), and ironic. ‘During the last

40 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 186. 41 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic

Literature, trans. by Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 64. 42 Williams, Marxism, p. 187. 43 Ibid, p. 189. 44 Ibid, p. 190; Terry Eagleton widens this use in his understanding of ‘literary mode of production’,

where literature’s production of meaning appears to be tied to the material conditions of production.

See Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), pp. 45-64. I am not stretching the

term this far in my use here in the thesis.

19

hundred years’, he writes, ‘most serious fiction has tended increasingly to be ironic in

mode’.45 Surveying a large corpus of Western literary texts produced within the last

two thousand years, he proceeds to show how the ironic mode variously uses the

mythical, elegiac, idyllic, or pastoral modes of an older time. Known as archetypal

criticism, Frye’s framework is insightful for a holistic study. But like Jameson’s

longue durée framework, it does not do justice to the immediate historical contexts

and conjunctures. There is no discussion in Frye as to why a certain mode is chosen,

or why it mixes with/brings together different ‘residual’ modes. He does regard the

changing social contexts as an influential factor, but the specific contexts are never

studied carefully.46 In the uses of Williams and Frye, then, modes are mainly generic

expressions of a long historical time period. These definitions do inform us about the

historical nature of modes but are not helpful in understanding the tremendously

energetic and dynamic nature of literary modes. In my reading of catastrophe-based

novels, I find modes to be responding to two aspects in particular: the specific form

and nature of the catastrophic events and the geo-cultural specificities in the content.

These specificities shape the form of realism and turn mode into both a determining

and yet a literarily unstable element. As Chris Baldick defines the term in his

Dictionary of Literary Terms, mode is ‘[a]n unspecific critical term usually

designating a broad but identifiable kind of literary method, mood, or manner that is

not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre’.47 I will note these complex

interactive matrices between form and mode through their relation to literary realism,

which I argue is the predominant literary form used for the catastrophic event-based

novels.

Realism is the manner through which a work of art imitates and registers the

workings of the world. It is both a philosophical/epistemological category and an

aesthetic form. Epistemologically, it means there is a world ‘out there’ and that it is in

principle possible to register the world through the medium of language, paint, camera,

or others. The method or the set of formal techniques through which the world is

45 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp.

33-35 (pp. 34-35). 46 In fact, the term ‘Western’ is also hardly properly qualified. 47 Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2015), <http://0-

www.oxfordreference.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/10.1093/acref/9780198715443.001.0001

/acref-9780198715443-e-736?rskey=L2SQr7&result=749> [accessed 16 April, 2017]

20

represented is what composes the aesthetic part.48 Novelistic realism arose with the

rise of industrial capitalism and Enlightenment values in the seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century European world.49 Raymond Williams tells us that because of the

term’s historical link with philosophical schools such as nominalism, conceptualism,

and others, there was a long debate within novelists as to what constituted real in

realism.50 A representation was considered ‘realistic’ which could reproduce objects,

characters, actions, and situations in a lifelike manner. But such a representation,

writers were acutely aware, focussed on the superficial appearance of reality. There

are individual emotions, feelings, social and historical forces operating behind the

appearance of reality in a particular way. For Williams, realism was not a static form

but ‘a conscious commitment to understanding and describing these forces’.51 Georg

Lukács, who is often credited with the critical popularity of the term, states that realism

is achieved when an author situates a social ‘type’ in a protagonist, in whom all the

socially and historically determining elements are active. Realism captures a

‘problematic’ individual’s negotiations with the pressures of society, and reveals in

the act the totality of structures unavailable to the fragmenting perspective of the

individual. In Studies in European Realism, he writes:

Realism means a three dimensionality, an all-roundedness, that endows with

independent life characters and human relationships. It by no means involves

a rejection of the emotional and intellectual dynamism which necessarily

develops together with the modern world. All it opposes is the destruction of

the completeness of the human personality and of the objective typicality of

men and situation through an excessive cult of the momentary mood.52

Lukács is reacting here against the rise of naturalism and (psychological) modernism

which, according to him, deliberately obstruct the comprehension of the roundedness

48 In order to understand the complexities involved in the act of literary mimesis, see, Erich Auerbach,

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by William R. Trask, intr. by

Edward Said (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [orig. pub: 1953]). 49 Ian Watt considers formal realism as a set of techniques that were meant to represent an older

society’s transition to capitalist modernity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. See, The Rise

of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1957), p. 31. 50 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1985), pp. 258-59. 51 Ibid, p. 261. 52 Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac,

Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, trans. by Edith Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1972), p. 6.

21

of life through ‘an excessive cult of the momentary mood’. The word ‘roundedness’,

which often appears in his readings of the novel, is important here. By roundedness,

Lukács means the community-oriented and heterogeneous life of characters in the

epics, which is now precluded by the complexities of modern civilisation and by the

mystification of life under bourgeois capitalism, and which the novelist seeks to

uncover and shape through the means of aesthetics: ‘The novel seeks, by giving form,

to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life’.53 Lukács understands totality

as:

[T]he formative prime reality of every individual phenomenon [which] implies

that something close within itself can be completed; completed because

everything occurs within it, nothing is excluded from it and nothing points at

a higher reality outside it; completed because everything within it ripens to its

own perfection and, by attaining itself, submits to limitation’.54

Totality is an organic development of the structure of society uncovered by art; but by

no means is this totality a reductive homogenisation of elements. There is a

‘paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole

which is then abolished over and over again’.55 The realist novel achieves totality

through repeatedly bringing and cancelling the organicity of these paradoxical and

disparate elements in its use of the devices of irony and narrative perspective, as well

as the other features of reflection, mood, chorus/minor characters, etc.56 For Lukács,

unlike Watt, realism is not a set of formal techniques or a method of producing

53 Lukács, Theory, p. 60. 54 Ibid, p. 34. 55 Ibid, p. 84 56 Ibid, p. 92; despite the more doctrinaire and strident temper of his writing in later years, Lukács’

belief in the roundedness of life, in the possibility through art and aesthetics to uncover the historical

conditions of society, and in the essentially historical impulse of realism, never lost track. That is why

his celebration of Tolstoy’s realism would also emphasise the ‘indissoluble’ character in the writer,

where disparate elements would not always harmoniously converge. This is also why a more polemical

and narrower take on realism in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism would include the ‘realistic

potential’ in Franz Kafka, where the nightmarish and improbable statements would be read not as a

‘straightforward anti-realism, but a dialectical process in which realism of detail negates the reality

described’. See Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. by John and Necke Mander

(London: Merlin Press, 1962). For his uneasy engagement with ETA Hoffmann, see the essay ‘Marx

and Engels on Aesthetics’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. by Arthur D. Kahn (New York:

Grosset and Dunlop, 1971), pp. 61-88 (especially pp. 75-80). On Kafka, see ‘Franz Kafka or Thomas

Mann’ in The Meaning, pp. 47-92. For his somewhat harsh and seemingly uninformed criticism of

Chinese theatrical realism or the realism of Rabindranath Tagore, see Studies in European Realism (p.

132) and the review essay of Tagore’s Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), pp. 8-11. On Tolstoy,

see the long essay ‘Tolstoy and the Development of Russian Realism’, in Studies, pp. 126-206.

22

verisimilitude, but rather a historical process which is forged through a writer’s deep

historical consciousness and his/her commitment to uncovering the economic,

political, and social forces influencing an individual’s feelings, decisions, and

actions.57

Note that both Williams and Lukács point at the processual/compositional

character of realism. Note also that they are both speaking of the essentially unstable,

heterogeneous, and paradoxical nature of the real and the realistic (despite it being

superficially understood as lifelike/photographic, etc.) within realism. However,

neither of them offers any specific thoughts on the use of mode here. Irony, satire,

pastoral, and so on, are presupposed as a novel’s form-giving element. Rather, these

are the modes through which realism’s formal shape is achieved, and through which

form appears to be a dynamic aesthetic category. A realist work does not simply

imitate the ‘world’ (in an uncritical mimetic sense); but ‘registers’ it. The word

‘register’ includes the dual meaning of historical/bureaucratic registration (‘to record;

to set down [facts, names, etc.] in writing, especially accurately or officially’) and of

mediated reproduction (‘to record in one’s mind, heart, or memory; to become aware

of, to notice properly’).58 Modes are chosen to respond to the historical specificity of

a period or a crisis-based event, and to represent these specificities adequately. As I

will argue in the thesis, the difference between a famine-based novel and a

contemporary or starvation-based one does not lie in their realism, if we read realism

as the commitment to describing and demystifying social-historical forces. They lie in

the use of modes. Irony and caustic humour in the registration of a catastrophic crisis

is a mode of expression; metafiction is another mode. They do not exist exclusively in

a narrative; there can be different modes used within a predominant ironic mode. In

fact, in many catastrophe-based realist works, modes shift somewhat quickly in order

to register the nature of violence adequately: from documentary to gothic, fantastic to

57 Lukács writes in The Historical Novel: ‘[The] historical sense, [which is] already present in practice,

of the possibility of generalizing the historical peculiarity of the immediate present, which had been

correctly observed by instinct, characterizes the position which the great social novel of England

occupies in the development of our problem. It drew the attention of writers to the concrete (i.e.,

historical) significance of time and place, to social conditions and so on, it created the realistic, literary

means of expression for portraying this spatiotemporal (i.e. historical) character of people and their

circumstances. But this […] was a product of realist instinct and did not amount to a clear understanding

of history as a process, of history as the concrete precondition of the present’. See The Historical Novel,

trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 18. 58 ‘Register’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, University of Warwick Library Database, http://0-

www.oed.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/Entry/161294?rskey=lsljPJ&result=3#eid [accessed

24 April, 2017].

23

social realist, etc. These historically specific, unstable, and heterogeneous modes

transform the realism of these event-based novels into a heterogeneous, experimental,

and ‘modernistic’ form.

The divide between realism and modernism has come to be questioned in

recent years, but mode has not received sufficient attention. In the volume Adventures

in Realism, which pays close attention to the self-conscious, experimental, and

modernist character of realism,59 Fredric Jameson tells us that since realism is used to

represent immediate social crises and greater historical shifts, the established realist

modes gradually come to seem less vital (‘limited and ossified’ in his words). 60 They

are then understood as unable to register deeper structural changes, ‘the ongoing

revolution’ or ‘some transitory moment in history’, and turn into ‘targets for the

defamiliarizations of the various emergent modernisms, which stigmatize their

conventions in the form of satire or absorb and sublimate their narratives into

generalized allusions’.61 He reads Ulysses as a ‘compendium of these residual realist

narrative lines and as an extraordinary new combinatory play with such residues’.62

This is also the point that Joe Cleary makes in his introduction to a 2012 issue of

Modern Language Quarterly on ‘peripheral realisms’.63 Realism and modernism are

not oppositional literary forms, but expansions of, and reworking on, the same form

produced and qualified by historical shifts in the world-system: ‘nineteenth-century

realism already contained latent modernisms that broke strongly to the fore only in

conditions of systemic crisis and that twentieth- century modernisms may equally have

retained latent realisms that may yet find novel articulations in new media or new

generic modalities in further moments of crisis’.64 Jameson adds in the same issue that

59 Adventures in Realism, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Beaumont tells us that

the features that the postmodernists celebrate in narratives – self-consciousness, parody, pastiche, irony

– are formative of realism. Realist writers employed a number of experimentations within the form both

from the acute awareness of the slipperiness of language and literary devices, and in order to capture

the shifting historical impulse of the age. Beaumont offers the working definition that realism is ‘the

assumption that it is possible, through the act of representation, in one semiotic code or another, to

provide cognitive as well as imaginative access to a material, historical reality that, though irreducibly

mediated by human consciousness, and of course by language, is nonetheless independent of it’ (p. 2). 60 Fredric Jameson, ‘A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion’, in Adventures, pp. 261-71 (p. 261);

for an elaborate reading on this, see his The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), especially

the chapter, ‘Realism and the Dissolution of Genre’, pp. 138-62. 61 Ibid, p. 266. 62 Ibid, p. 267. 63 Joe Cleary, ‘Realism after Modernism and the Literary World-System’, in ‘Peripheral Realism’, ed.

by Joe Cleary, Jed Esty and Collen Lye, Modern Language Quarterly, 73.3 (2012), 255-68. 64 Ibid, p. 268; in this context, also see the recent issue of ‘Worlding Realisms’, ed. by Lauren M. E.

Goodlad in the journal Novel, especially the article, ‘Realism Wars’ by Jed Esty, where Esty argues,

like Cleary, that the shifting imperial structures of domination in the early twentieth century, from

24

Third-World writers, the majority of whom sympathise with the Left, predominantly

use a realist style, while the constantly modernising impulse of their countries also

constitutes and shapes this style. A genuine realism, Jameson follows Lukács in

suggesting, is thus ‘a discovery process, which, with its emphasis on the new and the

hitherto unreported, unrepresented, and unseen, and its notorious subversion of

inherited ideas and genres […] is in fact itself a kind of modernism, if not the latter’s

first form’.65 He terms this realism a ‘modernistic realism’, which uses realism’s

conventions and then undermines them.

I will argue in the thesis that realism achieves this ‘modernistic’ end

predominantly through the use of modes. The ‘modernising impulse’ for a recently

decolonised Third-World country, dependent on the First-World for economic

reasons, often results in catastrophes: famines, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies,

civil war, etc. These catastrophes are, thus, historical and global in their formation.

But they are also specific in orientation and local in their impact. Novels capture this

relation through the use of modes. A famine, for instance, may have global-historical

(colonial) factors responsible for it, but the specificity of Bengali history and culture

in the late-colonial period will have vital influence in the literary registration of the

disaster. While there may be stylistic and formal convergences in the late-colonial

based novels on famines across the world, the cultural and historical contingencies, as

I will show in the next chapter, will also be notable in their shaping of the literary

form. My contention is that: if form is a commitment to understanding how historical

processes operate and how the world can be registered in a work, it is mode that offers

the framework to do so, and retains the heterogeneity of perspectives and the element

of self-reflexivity in fictional writing. It is through the dialectic of form and mode that

the dialectic of historical crises and events is registered, that epistemology and

aesthetics become combined and enabling. I am calling this framework of realism,

which is shaped by culturally specific use of modes and produced by a specific

historical/catastrophic conjuncture, as ‘crisis realism’. I will note here realism’s

Britain to the USA (and shifting now towards Asia) have caused writers and critics to see realism as

imperialistic and programmatic, and modernism and adventure fiction as its emancipatory opposite.

The recent world financial crisis and the contemporary rise of realist fiction may be the beginning of

the next phase of realism until the form is understood as saturated and programmatic with the further

shift of the imperialist domain. Realism and modernism, according to Esty, are less about aesthetic

differences than about geopolitically shaped expressions. Esty, ‘Realism Wars’, Novel: A Forum for

Fiction, 49. 2 (2016), 316-42. 65 Fredric Jameson, ‘Antinomies of the Realism-Modernism Debate’, in ‘Peripheral Realisms’, ed. by

Joe Cleary, Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, Modern Language Quarterly, 73.3 (2012), 475-85 (p. 476).

25

modernistic elements in late-colonial Indian works, and then move on to my final

observations on form and mode and on crisis realism.

In the colonies, realism has always been experimental and modernistic. As

Roberto Schwarz has shown, realism was imported and used with irony and parodic

elements in the slave-holding economy of Brazil.66 In the context of India, as

Meenakshi Mukherjee (1985) writes, the colonial novel was influenced by European

values of individualism, rationality, historical consciousness, and so on; but those did

not turn the colonial novel into a case of derivative realism.67 Because India was

predominantly an agricultural country, the main cultural products were oral in form –

e.g. jatra (folk theatre) and kathakata (oral recital of the purana stories) – which

frequently exploited the topics and narrative elements of the mythological and the

supernatural.68 Many of the novelists appear to deploy a mythological temporal

framework, and make heavy uses of allegory, symbol, and fable in their works, where

rational-linear progress and cyclical narration converge in the novel of development

(Bildungsroman).69 In a recent study (2012), Ulka Anjaria revisits some of these

contexts for a thesis on realism’s aesthetic capacities in the late-colonial period.70

Anjaria observes that writers who used the realist form were agonisingly conscious of

India’s problematic entrance into historical modernity, where anticipation of a

redemptive future and the disillusionment of the present were interconnected. Realism

had this paradoxical aspect of the impossibility of transparency and utopian futuristic

possibility:

At one level this paradox appears simply in aesthetic gaps: works that are

unrealistic, characterization that is unconvincing, plots that are episodic,

66 He calls literary form an abstract of specific social relationships through which the process of

transformation of social questions into ‘properly literary ones’ is realised. See ‘The Importing of the

Novel to Brazil and its Contradiction in the Work of Alencar’, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian

Culture (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 41-77 (p. 53). 67 Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: Novel and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1985), p. 4. 68 Ibid, p. 56; Mukherjee writes that it is important to ‘examine the synthesis of borrowed literary form

and indigenous aesthetic – as well as cultural expectations – in order to determine the extent to which

the form has undergone mutation in the process’, p. 18. 69 Indeed, she also finds extra-literary co-ordinates – such as Indian philosophy, religion, and the

moralistic discourses – as well as Indian concepts of history and fiction, as discursively interconnected

rather than antagonistic. It is necessary to mention here, as Supriya Chaudhuri has recently argued, that

the Bengali novel was born as a mode of satirical commentary on the imitations of the British and

Western cultures and on the lifestyles by the Bengali native elites and the nouveau riche. Chaudhuri,

‘The Bengali Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, ed. by Vasudha Dalmia

and Rashmi Sadana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 99-123 (p. 102). 70 Ulka Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary

Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

26

writing that is overdramatic, and so on. Seen from the perspective of desire,

however, these so-called failings can be reinterpreted as representing the

coincidence of richness and simultaneous impossibility, of mimesis and

metafictionality, that constitute the complex coordinates of realism in the

colony’.71

Through the use of allegory, symbol, or ‘metafictionality’, Anjaria adds, the writers

were politically engaging with the pressing issues of the period and breaking open the

nationalistic hegemonies of meaning and discourse that clouded critical judgement.

Priyamvada Gopal offers a more historically grounded and nuanced

understanding of the period in context in her use of ‘critical realism’. In her book,

Literary Radicalism in India (2005),72 Gopal writes that the publication of ‘Angarey’

(1932) – a collection of stories that challenged orthodox notions of community,

religion and gender – and the formation of the All India Progressive Writers

Association were pivotal for the building of a critical spirit for decolonisation, as

opposed to the bourgeois-nationalist discourses of harmony and inclusion. This critical

spirit was the product of the country’s particular late-colonial historical conjuncture.

Borrowing from Gramsci’s notion of the ‘terrain of the conjunctural’, ‘where

incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity)’,73 she

argues that, in the context of India’s transition from colony to nationhood, the

oppositional political force should not be understood only as a passive revolution of

Gandhian nationalism, which followed a politics of manoeuvre, neutralising political

heterogeneities and promoting a discourse of consensus. Instead, this oppositional

force encompasses numerous acts of peasant militancy and labour activism during the

period:

The conjunctural terrain of Indian nation formation in the decades just prior to

independence in 1947 is marked by the gathering of various forces of

opposition. Their activities ranged from trade union activism to peasant

agitation, and from the secularisation of state institutions to the proliferation

of diverse women’s organisations. Though inflected by the struggle between

British imperialism and Indian nationalism, the activities undertaken by these

various forces suggest that a multiplicity of projects were to be undertaken as

the transition from colony to nation took place. Gramsci’s contention that

71 Ibid, p. 15. 72 Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence

(London: Routledge, 2005). 73 Ibid, p. 18.

27

oppositional forces on the terrain of the conjunctural ‘seek to demonstrate that

the necessary and sufficient conditions already exist to make possible, and

hence imperative, the accomplishment of certain historical tasks’ is borne out

at this historical conjuncture.74

This offers a clear picture of the socio-politically tempestuous nature of the times.

According to Gopal, writers and filmmakers such as Anand, Premchand, Ismat

Chughtai, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, K. A. Abbas, and others were aware of the plural and

heterogeneous character of the conjuncture, as well as the tremendous political

energies of the period. They argued to retain political and literary heterogeneity in the

programmatic (Party-line) use of politics and literature. Their range of experiments in

writing and artistic production were meant to preserve literature’s critical exploration

of the socio-historical dimensions and its ‘ironic commitment to truth’. From this,

Gopal contends that realism of the age should be understood as ‘less a specific

aesthetic technique than a philosophy that brings together an affective sense of justice,

fairness and harmony with an understanding of all that violates that sense’.75 This

definition is powerful as it grasps both the political dimensions of fairness, rights, and

entitlement in the practice of realism and in the awareness of their violation in

everyday life. Critical realism in such a form appears to express a consciousness of

critical solidarity. My readings of the event-based novels also find a similar critical

awareness and visions of solidarity. At the same time, during periods of catastrophe

and wide social violence, such as the Partition or the famine, socially committed

writers have to also address the questions of documentation, analysis, puzzle of

incomprehension, and above all, reflection on the act of representation itself. In such

a formation, critical realism, I think, does not remain a choice or a question of balance

between philosophy and aesthetics techniques. The techniques shape the mode and

constitute the philosophy of fractured times. Manto’s Partition stories that Gopal

analyses can be used as an example here. Gopal tells us of the difference in critical

commentary as well as in the framing of narration in Manto’s pre- and post-Partition

stories.76 In reading one of the post-Partition stories, ‘Sau Kaindal Power ka Bulb’ (‘A

74 Ibid, p. 20. 75 Ibid, p. 27. 76 Manto’s pre-Partition stories are marked by ‘male sexuality and masculinity, on the one hand, and

patriarchy and the exploitation of women on the other’, while his post-Partition fiction appears ‘to bring

together psychobiography and historical analysis, probing the wounded recesses where individual and

community colluded in doing violence to themselves and to others in the cause of self-assertion’. Ibid,

p. 93.

28

100 Candle-Power Bulb’), she notes that Manto, instead of critiquing exploitation of,

or speaking fondly about, prostitutes (which he did in his pre-Partition fiction),

presents a nameless and stubborn female prostitute who does not want to be

understood or sympathised. As the protagonist, sympathetic to her situation, decides

to kill the pimp, he discovers in a ‘nightmarish’ scene that she has already killed him

and that he is not needed as her fantasied protector. Gopal offers a historical materialist

reading of the ending:

It would seem reasonable then to read the story as the critique to end all

critiques: a farewell to literary arms and the writerly aspirations to a realism

that would let the light of day upon the filth and grime that the rest of society

refuses to see. That was obviously not to be the case, certainly in terms of

Manto’s career and continued output. But the argument can certainly be made

that the experience of Partition and the devastation that followed chastened the

writer and made him aware of the relative modesty of his own and other literary

endeavours. It appears, in this instance, to have occasioned an

acknowledgement of the limits of what he could, in fact, explain and effect in

relation to social transformation.77

As I have been arguing, an event of catastrophic nature creates a new

consciousness within writers which is not entirely dissevered from the consciousness

of the past, but which requires improvisation of existing techniques as well as

importation of new modes of expression, and new strategies of narration for adequate

representation. Gopal’s reading here draws mainly upon sexuality and gender; in many

of his post-Partition stories Manto also focuses on the aspect of madness, and of losing

sense and speech acts (which can certainly be read through the lens of masculinity and

sexuality). In two of the stories, ‘In the Name of God’ and ‘Open It!’ Manto shows

how the main characters, respectively a mother and a father who have lost their

children due to the violence, are completely at odds as much with themselves as with

the institutions that try to assuage them and create an aura of normality in these times

of absolute madness: police station, prison, and medical centre. Indeed, one of Manto’s

iconic stories, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, is about lunatics in the asylums of Hindustan and

Pakistan who, after an order from the governments of these newly formed countries,

are about to be exchanged to their family’s country. One lunatic, Bishan Singh, who

had some landed property in a town called Toba Tek Singh, comes to know that his

77 Ibid, p. 118.

29

land now belongs to Pakistan, while his Sikh family has shifted to Hindustan. On the

day of exchange, Bishan Singh, who has been in the asylum for the last fifteen years

and been himself named Toba Tek Singh after his endless questions about this place,

resists his hand-over and takes a spot in the middle of the borders of the two countries,

resolute on his decision. The next day he dies there. The final lines are striking: ‘Over

there, behind the barbed wires was Hindustan. Over here, behind the identical wires

lay Pakistan. In between on a bit of land that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh’.78

Consider the restraint in emotion in the language: Manto uses caustic humour

throughout the narration to suggest the farcical and meaningless nature of the situation.

The case of a brief moment of pathos only aggravates the caustic nature: that human

bodies have become expendable now, violable and can be killed with impunity, and

human community, belonging, and ancestral place have also acquired a contingent

meaning. In dying on a land that does not belong to anyone, Toba Tek Singh and his

eponymous place appear to declare their resistance against violent disciplining and

mapping, and against coercive accommodation of their identity. This style of narration

also appears in the story, ‘The Dog of Tetwal’, in which a stray dog is given national

identities by the armies of Pakistan and Hindustan, by stringing cardboard pieces that

hold their nations’ names around its neck. The dog is killed in the end by both armies

for not being loyal enough to either nation. Manto’s juxtaposition of the merciless act

of dog-killing with the soldiers’ sentimental nostalgia for their homes and families and

the beautiful spring in the surrounding mountians serves to show that the dog is just a

victim of sport, or rather, that patriotism is a murderous sport itself.79 The heavily

symbolic nature of both stories cannot be overlooked either. The many scenes of

violence that characterise the Partition, the madness of killing, and the proliferating

case of men and women (and nonhuman animals), whose bodies are now suspended

in the middle of chartered territories both geographically and socially, who have lost

speech and communicability, or who are puzzled as to why they committed those

gruesome acts of violence, compel Manto to take up a narrative mode that is caustic,

bitter, reflexive and deeply satiric, where emotions and analysis merge, although not

without restraint. As Gopal correctly notes, there is a ‘fusion between reason and

78 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, in Black Margins: Sa’adat Hasan Manto Stories, ed. by M.

Asaduddin (New Delhi: Katha, 2001), pp. 212-20 (p. 220). 79 Ibid, pp. 188-99.

30

emotion’ in Manto’s post-Partition stories in contrast to the pre-Partition ones, which

‘tended to dichotomise emotion and intellect, or metonymy and metaphor’.80

The tendency to combine analysis with affect appears to be a characteristic

style of narration of the events, which are disastrous in nature and when narration is

done from a close distance with them. As we will see in Chapter Two, Bhabani

Bhattacharya, writing at a time soon after the famine, adopts an analytical-affective

mode. Amalendu Chakraborty, however, takes up a metafictional mode (through a

film about the famine) to understand the famine conditions in India’s postcolonial rural

society. I will show through a reading of Kamala Markandaya how these two modes

differ from the social realist mode based generally on the conditions of poverty and

scarcity. I will ask whether we can read a ‘disaster realism’ in Bhattacharya’s and

Chakraborty’s works. The Naxalbari movement, which I will focus on in Chapter

Three, extracts a quest mode from Mahasweta Devi, and an urban fantastic mode from

Nabarun Bhattacharya, who was writing years after the event on the possible irreal

urban guerrilla warfare. Together they are read as constituting ‘critical irrealism’. In

Chapter Four, I will discuss two predominant modes that authors deploy in order to

represent the violence committed by the state during the constitutional emergency:

extra-realist and critical realist. Here, analysis will draw upon works by Salman

Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan, Arun Joshi, Nayantara Sahgal, and Rohinton Mistry for an

argument on ‘emergency realism’. I will argue that, together, these catastrophe-based

realisms constitute the framework of crisis realism in postcolonial India.

Before turning to the chapters themselves, I would like to make two final notes.

First, this thesis is in no way an exhaustive reading of Indian novels of catastrophe and

crisis. Neither does it claim that these events together form an exclusive lens through

which the nature of Indian postcolonial modernity is to be perceived. One can choose

a number of events, such as the Partition, the Indo-Pakistan War, the Bhopal Gas

Disaster, and so on. By selecting these events, what I will try to understand is the

relation between (colonial) structures of domination, the conditions of life and living

for the oppressed and the marginalised in postcolonial times, and the practices and

discourses of resistance from below. This is why my studies begin historically from a

catastrophic event in the late-colonial period (the Bengal famine) and literarily from

80 Gopal, Radicalism, p. 119.

31

the postcolonial period (Bhabani Bhattacharya’s 1947 novel). Through these

selections, I have set myself to inquire into what literary form can say about these

catastrophic conditions and their traumatising futures, the ‘continuous’ nature of

historical crisis. Why is a mode chosen? What does this choice suggest about the

reception and registration of an event, of critical solidarity, or about an author’s social

values? What can a reading of crisis realism tell us about Indian postcolonial society

in general? Second, although there has been a large and complex body of literary

works on all of these three events, there is little secondary literature available on them.

In many cases, the literary texts are not widely circulated either. While authors such

as Rushdie and Mistry enjoy a commanding reputation in the field of postcolonial

literary studies, Sahgal, Markandaya, Joshi, and Bhabani Bhattacharya are relatively

neglected. Devi has only a handful of works translated into English; and texts by

Nabarun Bhattacharya, Chakraborty, and Vijayan are hardly known to a wide Indian

audience, let alone a global one. It has been a challenging task to read them and bring

them together for a study of historical crisis and postcolonial modernity. This task has

also been motivated by the desire to retrieve a body of writers who have been either

unjustly neglected or violently displaced and relegated to the margins for a certain

institutionalised politics of the field. Through this selection of reading, the thesis aims

to offer a counter-genealogy for the postcolonial Indian novel, one that is able to

address the questions of historical conditionality of the texts, as well as their nuanced

and interrogative uses of literary realism.

32

CHAPTER TWO

Disaster and Realism: The Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine

The 1943 Bengal famine occurred at a time when India was suffering from the

turbulence of the Second World War and the anti-colonial Quit India agitations. It took

the lives of nearly three million people, and aggravated the crisis so much that post-

independence India (1947–) could hardly recover from the slow violence of starvation

and malnutrition. The famine also gave rise to a number of literary and artistic works,

some of which were published much before the scholarly studies began on the disaster.

Through a study of two novels, one written in the immediate aftermath of the famine

and the other long after the disaster, I would like to show how this literature engages

with questions of the agrarian crisis in late-colonial India, with the role of colonial

governance and capitalism in the birth of the famine, and with the crisis of starvation

and slow violence in the postcolonial period. I will argue that it is mainly through an

eclectic and diverse use of literary realism that the novels register the disaster and its

consequences. With brief observations on a few novels based generally on scarcity

and starvation in post-independence India, I will show how disaster-based works

compel a different shaping of novel writing and form, and substantially broaden the

meaning and practice of literary realism.

By the 1940s, famines had become commonplace in Bengal. Kali Charan

Ghosh in Famines in Bengal (1944) traced the genealogy of Bengal famines. For lack

of documentation or for a better prevent system, the Mughal era (between 1630 and

1770) showed a strikingly fewer number of famines (only three). On the other hand,

Ghosh enumerated twenty-two documented famines, ‘excluding severe scarcities’,

between 1770 and 1943, i.e. the time period of British colonialism in India, of which

the 1943-1944 famine was the ‘worst’.81 The official study of the 1943-1944 Bengal

famine, published by the Famine Inquiry Commission in 1945, maintained that

reasons such as poor monsoon, drought and cyclone, and insufficient production of

81 Kali Charan Ghosh, Famines in Bengal, 1770-1943 (Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing, 1944),

p. 3.

33

food crops were responsible for it.82 But scholars like B. M. Bhatia and Amartya Sen

have subsequently showed that the famine had direct links with the conditions of war

and war-time capitalism. Bhatia (1991) used a range of government data and index

charts to show that there had been a considerable decline in employment and per capita

income since the early years of the twentieth century, which was followed by high

inflation in the post-First World War period.83 Between 1938 and 1943, there were

crop failures, ‘together with dislocation of normal channels of distribution of supplies

(due to the Second World War) and tendency on the part of the consumers, producers,

and traders to hoard the supplies’, which resulted in an unprecedented rise in prices

and decrease in marketable surplus.84 The colonial administration was unprepared for

this catastrophic conjunction and took no action to control prices, to combat corruption

among private traders and government trading agents, or to provide quick relief

measures.85 In Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen also raised many of these

issues, including the ‘boat denial’ and ‘scorched earth’ policies, namely, to burn all

boats along the Bengal border and to forcibly extract rice from the peasants for fear of

a Japanese invasion from the East.86 For Sen, the ‘vigorous speculations and panic

hoardings [...] encouraged by administrative chaos’, ‘the prohibition of export of

cereal in general and rice in particular’ from other provinces, the ‘uneven expansion

in incomes and purchasing powers’, and the decline of demand in crafts, utility or

luxury goods (which had actively produced an underclass of artisans, fisherfolk,

agricultural labourers) created a sharp discrepancy between the actual production of

food-grains and their market release, making it impossible for the poor and landless

labourers to purchase rice and other essential commodities. Sen termed it the failure

of ‘entitlement’ or the loss of the right to buy.87 Later studies of the disaster found a

number of related and other reasons for the disaster – from the collapse of social

82 See ‘Report on Bengal’, in Famine Inquiry Commission (New Delhi: Government of India, 1945),

pp. 40-82 (pp. 76-77). 83 Bhatia’s work was published in 1968, before the noted studies on the famine by Sen and others had

appeared. The work was revised and expanded in the 1991 edition. B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A

Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special Reference to Food Problem, 1860-

1990 (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1991), pp. 312-20. 84 Ibid, p. 323. 85 Ibid, pp. 333-39. 86 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1981), pp. 67-68. 87 Ibid, p. 70, pp. 76-78.

34

relations, colonial land policies, to fascism, imperialism, and Churchill’s political

strategies.88

The famine created a huge social crisis. In his anthropological study of the

famine (1949), Tarak Chandra Das recorded the influx of the destitute to the city: ‘By

the end of July 1943, the streets of Calcutta began to ring with the piteous cry of the

people who had come to the Second City of the British Empire for a morsel of food’.89

He went on to record in the first ten pages of his book the horrible living conditions

endured by these people: defecation in the open streets, widespread diseases,

competition for food within as well as between families, consumption of garbage,

unconsciousness, or even ‘death by starvation’.90 Kali Charan Ghosh dedicated a

chapter in his book to the journalistic accounts of starvation and death in the villages,

of migration of whole populations to the city, of their tired bodies being eaten alive by

jackals and dogs, of the barbaric fights between humans for a morsel of food from the

dump areas.91 These everyday incidents, along with the atmosphere of fear and

violence wrought by the Second World War and the nationalist movements (Quit India

agitations of 1942), produced a social crisis so deep that literary works of the period

could hardly avoid the phenomenon.92 Bhabani Bhattacharya, who wrote two famine

88 See these works for a further study of the famine: Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in

Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); David Arnold,

Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Madhusree Mukherjee,

Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York:

Basic Books, 2010); and more recently, Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End

of Empire (London: Hurst, 2015). 89 Tarak Chandra Das, Bengal Famine: As Revealed in a Survey of the Destitutes of Calcutta (Calcutta:

Calcutta University Press, 1949), p. 2. 90 Ibid, p. 10. 91 Ghosh, Famines, pp. 85-95. 92 A cursory look at the volume, variety, and richness of literary works produced in the immediate

aftermath of the famine serves the point. There are plays by Bijan Bhattacharya, Sachin Sengupta, Tulsi

Lahiri, and Banaful; novels by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Manik

Bandyopadhyay Bhabani Bhattacharya, Gopal Halder, and Sarojkumar Raychowdhuri; short stories by

Ela Sen, Parimal Goswami, Manoj Basu, and Prabodhkumar Sanyal; poetry by Sukanta Bhattacharya,

Amar Mitra, Premendra Mitra, and Bishnu Dey; songs by Jyotirindra Maitra, Hemango Biswas, and

Salil Chowdhury; choreography by Shanti Bardhan and Shombhu Bhattacharya; paintings and sketches

by Somenath Hore, Zainul Abedin, and Chitta Prasad; photography by Sunil Janah; and films by K. A.

Abbas, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen. For surveys of the literature and recent critical engagement

with the famine from the perspectives of history, gender, nation, etc. see these works: Margaret

Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997); Srimanjari, ‘War, famine,

and the Popular Perception in Bengali Literature, 1939-1945’, in Issues in Modern History, ed. by

Biswamay Pati (Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 2000), pp. 258-90; Kashinath Chattopadhyay, Uposi

Bangla: Samayikapatre Pancaser Manwantar (Famished Bengal: The 1350s Famine in Periodicals)

(Bakharahata: Seribana, 2007); and Rajender Kaur, ‘The Vexed Question of Peasant Passivity:

Nationalist Discourse and the Debate on Peasant Resistance in Literary Representations of the Bengal

Famine of 1943’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50.4 (2014), pp. 269-81. For a general reading of

35

novels in English, stated in an interview: ‘The emotional stirrings I felt (more than two

million men, women and children died of slow starvation amid a man-made scarcity)

were a sheer compulsion to creativity. The result was the novel So Many Hungers!’.93

However, writers of the time like Bhattacharya did not confine themselves only to

representation of the famine and its violence; they also addressed the complex issue

of how to represent the famine meaningfully within a particular literary genre or form.

Does the catastrophic nature of the famine call for the production of a new form? What

would be the mode to shape the form? How does one deal with the historical questions

regarding the genesis of the disaster and allow for the possibility of a catharsis of

human tragedy and trauma? Bijan Bhattacharya, who wrote the first popular and

critically successful famine play, Nabanna (1944; New Harvest), expressed these

concerns in an interview: ‘I saw the people dying like cats and dogs in the streets of

Calcutta muttering, fumbling […] Could I reach my ears forth to them? This was my

only thought. I would go to many places and sit thinking: What to write? What to do?

How to do? Just to gauge the depth of their suffering? While going on like this, I

thought that if I wrote a drama and actually produced it, would it be worthwhile?’94 I

will argue that these questions, compulsions, and related improvisations of the literary

form were a way to understand what a disaster was and what was specific about famine

as a disaster. These improvisations were also influenced by the urgent need to find a

‘realistic’ form that could address the suffering and tragedy, and could help release

the pain that the disaster and the socio-political turbulence of the period gave birth to.

Before reading the famine-based novels, I will offer a critical framework of how

disasters might shape literary form in order to understand how the novels, produced in

a historically specific conjuncture, both interrogate and enrich the framework through

their experimental use of modes.

history, politics, art and literature of the decade, see Calcutta: The Stormy Decades, ed. by Tanika

Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Delhi: Social Sciences Press, 2015). 93 Bhabani Bhattacharya, ‘Interview with Bhabani Bhattacharya’ Mahfil: Journal of South Asian

Literature, 5.1/2 (1968-1969), 43-48 (p. 43). 94 Quoted in Rustom Bharucha, Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p. 45.

36

Disaster, Famine, and Realism

The Oxford English Dictionary defines disaster as an ill-starred event (disaster

deriving from the word ‘astro’ or star): ‘anything that befalls of ruinous or distressing

nature; a sudden or great misfortune, mishap, or misadventure; a calamity’.95 Disasters

are generally understood to be sudden and natural events, and have long been

interpreted as meteorological/geological hazards, or as events linked specifically with

organisational behaviours or risk assessment policies and practices.96 With Kenneth

Hewitt’s pioneering study on vulnerability, and later studies on anthropological,

ideological, and social forces responsible for disasters, the paradigm of disaster studies

shifted from sudden and natural hazards to outcomes of historical processes. These

perspectives, anthropologist Oliver-Smith writes, have broadened the field and

informed us that disasters should not be understood as exclusive natural phenomena

but as ‘exosemiotic agents’, produced by the material practices of human beings and

the levels of vulnerability and geographical violence, and implicated in the ideological

discourses and perceptions of a place.97 Cultural studies scholar Eric Cazdyn writes

that disaster, in the capitalist world-system, should not be understood as ‘natural’; they

are rather ‘social in in genesis – products of human choices, political systems, even

cultural assumptions’.98 Disasters are never sudden: people, especially specialists in

the disaster fields, are aware of their impending occurrence. They are produced by the

crisis that is in-built within the capitalist system: ‘systems are structured so that crises

will occur,99 a point concurred by Naomi Klein in her influential book, The Shock

Doctrine (2007). For Klein, amongst the most pernicious of contemporary ideologies

is the understanding ‘that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of

freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy’. Instead, she

shows ‘that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by

the most brutal forms of coercion […] escalating levels of violence and ever larger

95 ‘Disaster’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, Warwick Library Database <http://0-

www.oed.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/Entry/53561?rskey=ch5Xei&result=1&isAdvanced=

false#eid> [accessed 18 Nov, 2016]. 96 For an anthropological introduction to disaster studies, see Catastrophe and Culture: The

Anthropology of Disaster, ed. by Susanna M. Hoffmann and Anthony Oliver-Smith (Santa Fe: School

of American Research Press, 2002). 97 Anthony Oliver-Smith, ‘Theorizing Disaster: Nature, Power and Culture’, in Catastrophe and

Culture, p. 41. 98 Eric Cazdyn, ‘Disaster, Crisis, Revolution’, in ‘Disastrous Consequences’, ed. by Eric Cazdyn, South

Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007), 647-62 (p. 648). 99 Ibid, p. 649.

37

disasters are required in order to reach the goal’.100 The manufacturing of disasters

comes from what Eric Cazdyn calls ‘pre-emptive measures’ taken by individual states

to avert ‘crises’,101 such as the acts of the US and the UK in the Middle East in the

wake of 9/11. War, drone strikes, and forced famines are part of these pre-emptive

measures, which have destroyed the lives of millions, pushed countries into permanent

states of war, and given birth to widespread religious and militant fundamentalisms.

These theoretical understandings of disaster as something historically,

socially, and ideologically produced have initiated a close and productive dialogue

between the fields of disaster studies and literary and cultural studies.102 In addition to

finding out how literatures and cultures register disasters and their impacts, these

studies have insightfully pointed out the link between a disaster’s orientation and the

formal pattern of a literary work. There are different kinds of disaster, such as ‘slow’

ones and ‘rapid’ ones in Oliver-Smith’s terms,103 which may arise from similar

systemic pressures such as capitalism and colonialism but are different in nature, type,

and consequence. Famine, for instance, unlike a cyclone, is not the result of slow, non-

visible geological plate tectonic movements; nor is it only about immediate effects. It

is both (tangibly) historical and immediate in reason and in effect. Historian David

Arnold tells us that famine is a specific kind of disaster which has a long and tangible

history of genesis. It is both an ‘event’, a rupture of a distinctive kind and period, and

a ‘structure’ that places into relief ‘a society’s inner contradictions and inherent

weaknesses’.104 Like B. M. Bhatia, Arnold holds that the causes for the Bengal famine

should not be located only in the immediate historical contexts of the war, but also in

the longer trends such as late-colonial land policies, the decline of agriculture in the

100 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2007), pp.

18-19. 101 Cazdyn, ‘Disaster’, p. 652. 102 In the field of literary-critical studies, apart from the works of Rob Nixon, Mark D. Anderson, and

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee who will be discussed here, see Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots:

Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007);

Imre Szeman, ‘System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’, South Atlantic Quarterly

106.4 (2007), pp. 807-23; Graeme Macdonald, ‘The Resources of Fiction’, Reviews in Cultural Theory,

4.2 (2013), pp. 1-24; ‘Catastrophe and Environment’, ed. by Anthony Carrigan, Moving Worlds:

Journal of Transcultural Writings, 14.2 (2015), pp. 1-140. 103 Hoffmann and Oliver-Smith, Catastrophe, p. 25. 104 Arnold, Famine, p. 7; we ought to remember here Sumit Sarkar’s arguments about how

deindustrialisation and commercialisation of agriculture by the British for the production of cash crops

in the late nineteenth century gave birth to a number of disasters.

38

province, the growing pressure of debt on peasants, and the subdivision of holdings,

etc., which laid the ground for the ultimate crisis portended by mass starvation.105

This line of argument is echoed in the literary critic Rob Nixon’s work, Slow

Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), in which Nixon, like Arnold

and Oliver-Smith, talks of two types of disasters: ‘spectacular’ disasters, such as

nuclear disasters or earthquakes, and ‘slow’ or ‘attritional’ disasters, like malnutrition,

toxic drifts, epidemics, etc.106 Attritional disasters are those ‘that overspill clear

boundaries in time and space (and) are marked above all by displacement – temporal,

geographical, rhetorical and above all technological displacements’.107 In order to

accommodate the nature of suffering over time and space, literary narratives of the

attritional catastrophes undergo a significant stretch of their generic and stylistic codes

and remodel the literary form (which Nixon shows through an astute study of literary

works by Arundhati Roy, Wangari Mathaai, Mahasweta Devi, and others). Another

literary scholar, Mark D. Anderson in Disaster Writing (2011), speaks of the relation

between the nature of disaster and the kind of writing that disaster gives birth to:

‘Disaster narratives that arise following a single powerful event […] often mirror

existing forms and draw on latent political narratives to endow the event with social

meaning’, while disaster that recurs over time ‘often engender[s] its own aesthetics,

allowing it to transcend its moment’.108 Thus, the ‘event’ of an earthquake in Mexico

generates the ‘cronica’ (journalistic) form composed of collage techniques and public

forum comments,109 while the structural/processual nature of the Great Drought of

Brazil of 1877-1879 in the North-Eastern Sertáo region produces a combination of

naturalistic and journalistic prose styles in the idiom of Émile Zola (whose emphasis

on literary writing as scientific documentation influenced early twentieth-century

Brazilian works on this region).110 Nixon and Anderson here imply that the

temporality of a disaster determines the uneven form of literature based on it.

However, time is not the only determining factor in the shaping of literary form. Space

is also important. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee notes in a study on famine, fevers, and

105 Ibid, p. 41. 106 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2013), p. 2. 107 Ibid, p. 7. 108 Mark D. Anderson, Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 22. 109 Ibid, p. 165. 110 Ibid, p. 78.

39

other epidemics in Victorian India (2013) that the tropics, understood by the British

imperialists as the ideological zone of disaster, compelled significant modifications

within the existing genres of imperial travel writing, short stories, and the historical

novel. There was a radical shift of literary modes between the gothic, the realist, the

autobiographical, and the historical; and an unevenness of style, which exposed the

contradictions and anxieties within the ‘palliative’ practices of the empire (i.e.

imperialism as an act of care, a relief effort, to rescue the natives from themselves as

well as from their disastered geography). In short, Mukherjee posits, ‘“disaster

environment” demanded disaster styles of writing’.111

Disaster fiction has seldom been considered successful in literary terms. There

is a dominant belief in critical and academic circles that disaster resists art, that a

certain amount of time needs to pass before great art can be made as a response to

disasters, or that novels written during disasters are mere journalistic interventions.112

In these arguments, the question that remains unexplored is whether the stylistic and

formal changes are compelled by a disaster-born urgency. What is expected of art set

in a time of immense horror, with corpses and carcases scattered everywhere? How to

capture the immediate horror and situate the historical/analytical aspects? To engage

with these aesthetic questions is at the same time to ask the historical ones: how was

the famine manufactured? How was it seen by people or responded to? Or, how has

the famine generated an enduring socio-political crisis in the postcolonial period? My

contention here is that disaster writing or art should be understood broadly as

expanded or re-purposed realism. My studies of novels and other kinds of literary

works based on the 1943 Bengal famine show that the categories of disaster, more

specifically famine here, and realism are interlinked. The primary reason for this claim

is that, unlike Nixon’s understanding of famine as an attritional disaster, I find it to be

simultaneously spectacular and attritional. The spectacular aspect of the event appears

in its immediacy of devastation (starvation, everyday suffering, dying on the streets),

while the attritional or slow aspect is understood in its temporal breadth, the slow

111 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and

Literary Cultures of South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), p. 24. 112 See Paul Varughese’s criticism of Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel So Many Hungers!, qtd in

Chandrasekharan, Bhabani Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1974), p. 56; for a different

analysis of the impossibility of novel-writing in the aftermath of the Great Asian Tsunami, see Deckard,

‘“Calligraphy of the Wave”: Disaster Representation and the Indian Ocean Tsunami’, in ‘Catastrophe

and Environment’, ed. by Anthony Carrigan, Moving Worlds: Journal of Transcultural Writings, 14.2

(2015), pp. 25-45.

40

genesis and the accumulated nature of its formation (the ‘structure’ in David Arnold’s

terminology). The writers of the Bengal famine seem to have this understanding in

mind in their use of form and mode, which range from journalistic reportage, gothic

horror, melodrama, satire, irony, and historical analyses, and through which the

conjunctural nature of famine is presented. For example, Tarashankar

Bandyopadhyay’s novel Manwantar (1944; Epoch’s End),113 which was primarily

about the fear and panic that the Second World War and the Japanese bombings

created in Calcutta and not directly about the famine, nonetheless refers to a number

of concrete historical reasons for the disaster. The novel ends as the famine approaches

the city with starvation, violence, and death. Bandyopadhyay uses various stylistic

features and modal choices to register the social conditions: naturalistic imagery to

capture the immediate horrible effects, melodrama to render pain, analytical accounts

to explain longer factors responsible for the disaster, and episodic structure to suggest

the impossibility of writing a linear narrative at a moment of huge social crisis. What

is noteworthy is that a comparison between this novel and his earlier fiction, notably

Ganadevata (The Temple Pavilion) or Kalindi,114 shows that the formal and modal

issues in this novel have undergone significant shifts and improvisations but have not

departed entirely from the conventions of realist writing. I argue that these shifts have

taken place because the writer attempts to understand the nature of the disaster and

responds to the question of how to realistically represent it.115

113 Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Epoch’s End, trans. by Hirendranath Mookherjee (Calcutta:

Mitralaya, 1945). 114 Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Kalindi’, in Tarashankar Rachanabali Dwitiyo Khando (Kolkata:

Mitra and Ghosh, 1975), pp. 1-260; ‘Ganadevata’, in Tarashankar Rachanabali Tritiyo Khando

(Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh, 1986), pp. 103-370. 115 As I argued in the previous chapter, there is a vital link between the terms realistic and realist, but

they are not interchangeable. The impetus to represent something realistically about a disaster often

comes from the perception of the enormous horror that one witnesses. Realistic art offers the therapeutic

possibility that these difficult moments of trauma and healing are a collective experience and act (that

thousands of others are also suffering from the trauma arising from a tragedy and that we are not alone).

There are a number of strategies and resources which are implemented to make a narrative realistic

about hunger, some of which I discuss here through the works of Bhattacharya and Chakraborty. For a

comparative analysis, see these novels: Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937), Devi’s

Khsudha (Hunger; Kolkata: Karuna, 1981), and Ollikainen’s White Hunger (2015). For the realistic in

narrative, see George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady

Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit:

Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

41

The question of disaster and realist representation has been raised by Anthony

Carrigan in an essay, ‘Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies’.116 Charting brief

histories of disaster and postcolonial studies, Carrigan argues for a decolonised

disaster studies where the epistemological and cultural practices of a catastrophe-

based text, especially from the Global South, would be read politically through their

links with the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and current forms of global

capitalism. Reading Kamau Brathwaite’s magnum opus, MR (Magical Realism) where

Brathwaite asks us to understand ‘the intimate relationship between power,

exploitation, violence, and disaster’ and ‘a multivalent concept of “nature” as material

and metaphysical entity’,117 Carrigan argues that magical realism in Brathwaite’s

multiple, often elusive definitions becomes more of ‘an alternative epistemology or

mode of understanding than a conventional literary genre as such, which emerges in

contradistinction to the catastrophic epistemologies embedded in western

colonialism.’118 Brathwaite seems to grasp at the root of the debate here that a literary

form is essentially a mode of consciousness, understanding, and expression. But

Brathwaite’s linking of magical realism with ‘the literature […] of optimistic

catastrophe’ and of social realism with ‘the literature of negative catastrophe’ appears

problematic to me.119 For Brathwaite social realism betrays the linear, sequential

narrative of colonialism and progress, and, subsequently, of catastrophe, and is unable

to capture the counter-hegemonic narrative of the underprivileged and the subaltern.

Magical realism, on the other hand, is experimental, layered, and radical in

representing the historical continuities and discontinuities in the colony. I think this

reading does not do justice to the formal heterogeneity within social realism, and, in

not qualifying the use of the terms such as realism, social realism, critical realism, etc.,

it puts all these terms under a homogenising epistemology (threatening in the act the

very thesis of epistemological and historical difference within the practices of magical

realism constructed by Brathwaite).

Realism in the colony, as I discussed in the previous chapter, is used in an

immensely critical fashion; it is highly political in energies and deeply self-conscious

116 Anthony Carrigan, ‘Towards A Postcolonial Disaster Studies’, in Global Ecologies and the

Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and

Anthony Carrigan (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 117-39. 117 Ibid, p. 125. 118 Ibid, pp. 126-27; emphasis in original. 119 Kamau Brathwaite, MR, 2 Vols. (New York: Savacou North, 2002), p. 347.

42

in the practices of combining Western and indigenous aesthetics. When the realist

framework is used to render the event of a disaster, the form goes through further

complication and improvisation. Mihir Bhattacharya’s essay, ‘Realism and the Syntax

of Difference’ (2004), gives us a useful lead here.120 Bhattacharya considers the

Lukácsian thesis on the individuation of the novel through world-historical ‘types’,

but adds that to realise the ‘historicity of aesthetic strategies’ is to also recognise many

other ways of constructing a realist text. The ‘organic’ sequential mode of narrative, a

product of the bourgeois era, he argues in the same spirit as Meenakshi Mukherjee

(1985), was imported and implemented in British India but ‘it never swamped

different fictional means of constructing a sequence’.121 He studies the famine

narratives of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (Ashani Sanket or The Ominous Sign)

and Manik Bandyopadhyay (Chintamani), written between 1944 and 1946, in order to

show the range of techniques that these authors used within the form of realism.

Whereas Bibhutibhushan’s story, set in a village, is narrativised largely through what

Bhattacharya calls the relation between ‘motivation’ and ‘device’ (the construction of

famine narratives through allusions, fragmentary discussions, and sudden scenes of

horror), Manik Bandyopadhyay by contrast practises an ‘analytical’ style of writing.

Rather than locating ‘narrative truth’ in the ‘epistemic’ boundaries of the villagers

(that the historical reasons of the famine as something impossible for the villagers to

understand, which Bibhutibhushan suggests through a conspicuous absence of

analytical discussions of the famine on the villagers’ part, and through showing briefly

in the end the disaster’s devastating effects on these vulnerable and ignorant people,

inviting pity and sympathy), Manik presents historical causality in the expression and

arrangement of images, in diction and rhythm, and in the use of dialects, and attempts

to situate the links between these and the larger historical conditions and forces such

as imperialism and colonialism. Manik’s realism violates the epistemic boundaries to

present the ‘unrepresentable’, which, as a Marxist and social activist, he ‘perceived to

be a much needed form of cultural practice in the contemporary phase of the evolution

of the indigenous form of Indian modernity’.122 Bhattacharya concludes that Manik’s

imagistic and syntactical improvisations and the analytical registers he uses to express

120 Mihir Bhattacharya, ‘Realism and the Syntax of Difference: Narratives of the Bengal Famine’, in

The Making of Indian History: Essays Presented to Irfan Habib, ed. by K. N. Panikkar, Terence Byres,

and Utsa Patnaik (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 478-500. 121 Ibid, p. 491. 122 Ibid, p. 480.

43

the deeper structural changes in society arise from his engaged understanding of

world-historical forces and their effects on the contemporary colonised Indian

society.123 To this line of argument I would like to add that it is not only the world

historical forces that realism registers through its various capacities, but also the

trauma and suffering, the possibility of releasing the tragedy and the depth of pain

created by the famine, what Margaret Kelleher in The Feminization of Famine calls

literature’s power of ‘quasi-intuitiveness’ to express the ‘inexpressible’.124 For

socially committed writers writing about a famine from close distance, there is as

much desire to analyse and demystify the oppressive forces responsible for the famine

as to justify why such analysis and identification is important, and to express the

inexpressible by writing a ‘realistic’, heartrending tale of tragedy and loss. As the

famine turns into chronic malnutrition and slow violence in the ensuing years, writers

appear to employ a new set of formal and modal features ranging from a long first-

person narrative account/memoir by a peasant, an omniscient narration interspersed

with free indirect discourse about an urban poor criminal, or a story-within-a-story

structure, to construct a realistic narrative of suffering and crisis. These modal

variations and formal changes, born of the famine and the severe crisis in food

afterwards which turned the social space of postcolonial Bengal and India into a

disaster environment, constitute what borrowing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee

can be called ‘a disaster style of writing’ in the postcolonial context.125 I will now turn

to the novels themselves and test out some of these arguments. The two novels I

discuss at length are Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! (1947) and Amalendu

Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhane (1982), which is written approximately forty years

later and revisits the famine. I will also provide a brief formal study of a novel by

Kamala Markandaya to understand how economic scarcity and starvation in the post-

independence era drive writers to dominantly take a social realist form which is

different from the disaster-based realist style.

123 Ibid, p. 499. 124 Margaret Kelleher, Feminization, pp. 3-4. 125 Mukherjee, Victorian, p. 24.

44

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers!: The Disastrous Decade

and the Analytical-Affective Mode

Bhabani Bhattacharya (1906-1988) began his literary career in the 1940s. Born in an

affluent Bengali family and educated in London, Bhattacharya had a promising

professional career. During his study at the University of London, he was influenced

by Marxism (Harold Laski’s theory of ‘crisis in democracy’) and participated in the

League Against Imperialism, writing eventually a Ph.D. thesis on the socio-political

agitations in Bengal in the nineteenth century.126 These interests turned him towards

the questions of violence and injustice in contemporary India perpetrated by the

systems of colonialism and imperialism. During his Ph.D., as his literary biographer

Dorothy B. Shimer tells us, he avidly read contemporary literary works and was highly

moved by such writers as Knut Hamsun, Romain Rolland, John Steinbeck, and John

Dos Passos.127 He came back to Bengal in 1934 and started working as a journalist,

meanwhile also translating into English some of the poems by Rabindranath Tagore.

With suggestions from Tagore, he started writing a novel in English (to be published

later as Music for Mohini), but could not proceed as the Bengal famine ‘compelled’

him to write and publish So Many Hungers! (1947).128 It was then followed by another

novel based on the same event, namely He Who Rides a Tiger (1954).129 Critics have

found the latter more intriguing in style. Born of and exhibiting a sense of urgency, So

Many Hungers! has been criticised as weak in structure, fragmentary and uneven in

style.130 However, I argue that these criticisms do not take the stylistic issues carefully

enough. A disaster is the moment of collapse of all social and ideological structures

into fragments. It is also the moment when, as Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (2010)

writes, the underlying structures that push the system towards this collapse are

exposed (noted specifically when the structures are reconfigured cognitively and

aesthetically).131 In order to capture this dialectic of fragmentation of the total system

126 See Dorothy B. Shimer, Bhabani Bhattacharya (Boston: Twayne, 1975), pp. 12. 127 For a list of writers by whom he was influenced by or with whom he had contact, see Shimer,

Bhabani, pp. 8-10; also see his interview in Mahfil, p. 44. 128 Bhabani Bhattacharya, So Many Hungers! (Bombay: Jaico Publishing, 1964). 129 Bhabani Bhattacharya, He Who Rides a Tiger (London: Angus and Robertson, 1960). 130 See Varughese quoted in Chandrasekharan, p. 56; M. K. Naik, A History of Indian English Literature

(New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1999), pp. 213-14; Priyamvada Gopal, The Indian English Novel:

Nation, History, and Narration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 61. 131 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary

Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 144.

45

and the perception of totality, it becomes necessary for a socially committed writer to

follow a style of writing that is different from a conventionally written novel. At the

same time, a disaster writer has to also negotiate the trauma and suffering caused by

the disaster by writing a realistic account of the production and effects of the crisis

and the possibility of overcoming them. Bhattacharya learnt of this humanist model

of literary realism from the Progressive Writers’ Association, which espoused the need

to write literature about the downtrodden and the oppressed in colonised societies, to

show empathy for as well as critical solidarity with them, and to bring into the open

and to criticise the dominant structures responsible for their cause. He admired

Premchand’s understanding of literature as ‘holding a mirror’ to society and his

realism’s complex representational capacity.132 But he also knew that the mirrored

representation of society had deficiencies when the society in context was going

through a huge moment of immediate crisis produced by a catastrophe: the War, the

sudden emergence of skeletal people in public spaces asking for rice-water, the

avoidable deaths of humans and nonhumans on the streets, the rackets of black-

marketing, the rise of prostitution as a profit-making business, and the unbridled

amassing of wealth by the middle and upper classes. The realisms of Premchand and

Steinbeck had to be improvised to adequately represent the immediate and wide

ruptures in society, the historically specific nature of the event. They had to be

combined with rigorous causal analysis of the historical forces, and with deep

emotional and emphatic use of language and tone in order to make literature

therapeutic. It is from this rooted historical perspective and social commitment that

Bhattacharya composes his fractured art and his analytical-affective mode.

So Many Hungers! is temporally marked from the beginning and shuttles

between the city of Calcutta and a village called Baruni. It begins on the inauspicious

day of the Second World War when Rahoul, a Cambridge-returned scientist now

working at the University of Calcutta, listens to the All India Radio and wonders about

India’s fate in this Great Battle: ‘But could a people step out into a war said to be

waged for democratic freedom, so long as that freedom was denied them? India in

bondage asked to fight for world freedom!’133 This thought reminds us of Nehru’s

132 See Premchand, Sahitya ka Uddeshya [The Purpose of Literature] (Allahabad: Hans Prakashan,

Caxton, 1967), pp. 100-38. Also consult Ulka Anjaria for a compelling analysis of the word ‘mirror’ in

Lukács, Premchand, and literary realism; Anjaria, Realism, pp. 8-12. 133 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 9.

46

concern that India should not support the British and participate in the war of freedom

when it was itself unfree.134 Thoughts of this kind would increasingly lead Rahoul to

the nationalist cause. His younger brother Kunal decides to join the British army and

prove himself, while his father Samarendra Basu, who works as a barrister, is

interested in the profits to be made from the War. For him, war is a huge business, ‘a

storm in the share market’.135 These thoughts are contrasted with the nationalist

concerns and activism of Devata, an old man worshipped as God (Devata meaning

God), in the village of Baruni. Devata turns out to be Rahoul’s grandfather who

sacrificed family and material wealth for the Gandhian cause of non-violent anti-

colonial resistance. He is supported by the peasants in the village, represented by

Kajoli’s family – Kajoli and her mother will have to bear the brunt of the famine and

emigrate to Calcutta as her father and brother are arrested for the Quit India

connections. Modelled on Gandhi, Devata takes care of the villagers’ welfare, teaches

the peasants moral integrity and speculates on such matters as the destruction of the

rural economy through the scorched earth policy and others. In these two characters,

Bhattacharya forges a combination of Nehru and Gandhi during the Second World

War and the nationalist movements and situates his critical commentary.

Hungers follows an expert/academic style of analysis.136 Rahoul and Devata

are representative characters through whom the historical context of the famine is

situated. As Rahoul comes to meet his grandfather and they discuss nationalist struggle

and redistribution of land, Devata briefly refers to the history of the Permanent

Settlement: ‘And he spoke of the background of Bengal’s rural life – of how long ago,

at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a servant of the British Trading Company

made a “permanent settlement” with the landlords of Bengal, fixing for all time their

annual payment to the Treasury’.137 Devata is aware of the colonial history and can

see through the changes in current agrarian policy or the post-war crisis in land

revenues and agriculture. This passage suggests Bhattacharya’s academic knowledge

134 For a reading on the late-colonial political context, especially from the perspectives and practices of

the Indian Congress, Gandhi, and Nehru, see Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise

History of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 200-214 (p. 207). 135 Ibid, p. 5. 136 For a reading of how the novel, owing to Bhattacharya’s expertise in academic and journalistic

writings, draws its analytical style of discourse-making in the historical and social sciences, see my

essay, ‘Colonial Governance, Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Novels of the 1943

Bengal Famine’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 47.4 (2016), pp. 45-70. 137 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 19.

47

in the socio-political and economic history of Bengal. Devata here refers to terms like

value of land, agreement between landlord and cultivator, hierarchy of overlords, cash

crop, and profit: ‘The peasantry was not in their eyes a living mass; it was like a tract

of coalfield out of which you hewed coal for profit and more profit, heedless of its

exhaustion’.138 These terms are not only technical in character and require knowledge

in political economy, they also underline a Marxist analysis at work here. Marx wrote

in Capital I that human labour under the capitalist system turns into a commodity and

human endeavour into a mechanical thing – a process which the Caribbean

intellectual, Aimé Césaire called a ‘thing-ification of life’.139 Bhattacharya, suggests

that colonialism and capitalism are deeply connected, and in order to resist this system

of abstraction and commodification and to regain human agency, the anti-colonial

campaigns must begin with the peasantry, with boycotting Western products and using

native resources (reminding us of Gandhi’s call for civil disobedience and for the

peasantry to unite in the struggle).140 He then sarcastically defines this incidental

aspect of reification as the system of life under imperialism. As Samarendra suffers

nightmares over the crashing of the Stock Exchange in Calcutta, Bhattacharya’s

narrator says, ‘The fate of India would anyhow be decided at a conference table, and

the Crown’s brightest possession would change hands with the ease of a cheque

passing from account to account’.141 A country is not its people and social ecosystem,

but a piece of paper whose fate is decided at conference tables. The reference to ‘the

Crown’s brightest possession’ points to both Britain’s imperialist history in India142

and Bhattacharya’s critique of how in imperialism countries are seen as resources for

material wealth, possessions of imperialist powers, and looted, plundered, and passed

on to others for further exploitation.

138 Ibid, p. 19. 139 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol I, trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward

Aveling (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 27; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans.

by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 6. 140 For a compelling study on Gandhi’s call to peasantry, see Judith Brown, ‘Gandhi and Indian

Peasants, 1917-1922’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 1.4 (1974), 462-85; it should be noted here that

Bhattacharya was highly influenced by Gandhian non-violent anti-colonialism, and wrote a couple of

books on Gandhi himself. See Bhattacharya, Gandhi, the Writer: The Image as it Grew (Delhi: National

Books Trust, India, 1969); and Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1977). 141 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 29. 142 See The Asiatic Annual Register, 1804, p. 31; for a historical study, see Nancy F. Koehn, The Power

of Commerce. Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1994).

48

The most current form of resource-related exploitation, Bhattacharya suggests,

is the speculative mode of capitalism where resources and profit-making are based not

on the availability of materials (food grains) but on the possibility, i.e. the speculations

and predictions, of such availability. Samarendra who invested all his money, his

wife’s jewellery, and everything he had during the War suffers a huge defeat as Britain

is defeated momentarily: ‘His large profits had been wiped clean as though they were

a mere figure on the plate’; but in just a few days’ time, as the British army begins to

win crucial battles, his luck is restored and his riches come back doubled in profit.143

Bhattacharya indicates that this mode of capitalism was predominant during period

and might be an important reason for the famine. Bhattacharya’s indication is not

altogether baseless. The speculative mode of capitalism was instituted in Calcutta

during the Second World War. Historian Ritu Birla in Stages of Capital (2009) traces

the gradual conversion of gambling and speculations into laws governing market

economy in late nineteenth-century Britain and India. These ‘fictions of law’, as she

calls them, ‘conjured new vehicles and instruments for trade, finance and charity,

orchestrating new incarnations of capital as they enforced the distinction between the

market and bazaar’.144 However, these new forms of ‘time’ and ‘bargaining’ were

difficult to integrate into the kinship-based and colonised form of market in India, and

they were accompanied by the forces of nationalism and critique of a free market

economy. But by the 1920s, Birla notes, debates around the ‘market profitability and

nonmercantile public engagement in speculative capital’ took place in Britain and

India, bolstered by systematic curricular studies on commerce and market in

Presidency College, Calcutta, which linked civil society with the emerging commerce

economy and institutionalised the market as the ‘lived supralocal abstraction’, a part

of everyday private and public life.145 Urban businessmen likely had a knowledge of

speculative economy by the time the war broke out and tasted the first fruits of profit-

making through hoarding and speculation during the war. In So Many Hungers!,

Samarendra, elated with the outbreak of the War, asks Rahoul, ‘[s]teel will rise

steeply, so will gold—which to choose?’146 He knows that war is ‘the most enriching

143 Bhattacharya, Hungers, pp. 34-35. 144 Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 143. 145 Ibid, p. 151. 146 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 6.

49

industry’,147 ‘a God-sent opportunity’,148 and that the shares market will be booming

with speculation on demand and supply. For him, one needs to liquidate everything

and invest it in the right speculative venture. In an innovative prose style reminiscent

of John Steinbeck, Bhattacharya records the onrush of people buying and selling war

material:

Gold rush in Clive Street. A motley crowd surging by the Stock Exchange […]

Pulses pounding. The blood beating in the ears. The crowd with cash in the

banks, cash to play with […] Buy munitions of war – things that make guns,

shells […] No rubber shares in the market? A telegram to Singapore does the

trick. Send fast telegrams to Singapore. Shape up Singapore […] What have

you to buy with? Open your pass-books. Empty your accounts. Take a loan

from friends. Mortgage your house. Sell, sell your gold, the gold on the body

of your wife.149

This is a remarkable picture of the rise of wartime stock markets: the sheer madness

of the profit economy, the pounding pulses, the rash speculations, and the liquidation

of material property. Note the passage’s staccato rhythm that imitates the speed of the

key element of the share market – information. The passage directs our attention to

how the stock economy creates its own market, especially in the example of rubber

shares where the unnecessary material can be sold on the basis of rumours or

communications, reminding of Karl Polanyi’s notion of the self-regulating nature of

capital and its production of fictitious commodities (how capital makes land, labour,

and money into fictions and how these fictions shape human need).150 Bhattacharya’s

innovative, modernist prose manages to convey the hurried actions of the city’s middle

class for hoarding and black marketing materials that will be needed for war.

Samarendra’s investments into an unknown future is, thus, a structural part of colonial

(finance) capitalism. As the money comes back doubled, Samarendra decides to open

a rice hoarding company, Cheap Rice Ltd. From his remarks above on the hike in price

147 Ibid, p. 17. 148 Ibid, p. 31. 149 Ibid, pp. 15-16. 150 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston:

Beacon, 2001). Polanyi writes: ‘[L]abour is only another name for human activity which goes with life

itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity

be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is

not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is

not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of

them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labour, land, and money is entirely fictitious’

(p. 72).

50

in specific materials, it seems that he knows (possibly from his experience during the

First World War) that during war, the (colonial) government is in need of a lot of rice

to feed the vast number of British Indian soldiers. So, all the essential commodities –

rice, sugar, oil, and steel – will be in demand. He is so much persuaded by his

conjectures that he decides to give up on his barrister career and invest all his energies

in building a hoarding business. Bhattacharya indicates that it was difficult to resist

such an attractive form of capitalism. As the narrator discloses, ‘Samarendra had no

other thought that spring and summer save rice: no other interest, no other dream. He

and his colleagues worked feverishly building up the business’.151

This mode of capitalism did not remain enclosed only in the city but reached

the countryside as well through the ‘trader class’ which, as Birla notes, bridged the

gap between the rural and the urban.152 In this novel, Girish, the local trader, is that

bridge. Girish’s grocery store is a ‘link between the peasant and the market-place’ in

the event that people miss the Saturday haat (the rural bazaar).153 His dream of selling

stocks in the remote urban market remains unrealised until he receives a profitable

contract from a district agent who informs him about a pyramid scheme from which

he can earn commissions from stocking the villagers’ rice.154 He proceeds to plant fear

in the villagers about an imminent Japanese invasion and the horrible prospects of

looting, raping, and vanquishing the population.155 Bhattacharya shows how Girish

and his men spread posters, handouts, and leaflets disseminating the notion of ‘evil

looking’ Japanese coming to violate the honour of the land and ‘Bengal’s beautiful

women’, and how in the acts the colonial racist stereotypes (here about the Japanese

peril) appear internalised and methodically used by the colonial comprador classes of

the money-lenders and commodity traders to exploit the peasantry.156 Girish largely

succeeds in his plan as many people yield their produce to Cheap Rice Ltd.157 Together

with the scorched earth (or the boat denial) policy enacted by the colonial

government,158 these activities, Bhattacharya indicates, debilitate the rural economy

and compel the villagers to emigrate to the city for food and shelter, giving rise to a

151 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 39. 152 Birla, Stages, p. 145. 153 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 58. 154 Ibid, p. 62. 155 Ibid, pp. 81-84. 156 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 62, p. 141. 157 Ibid, pp. 102-06. 158 Ibid, p. 51.

51

destitute class and intensifying the horrible conditions of living by the urban poor. The

narrator states ‘Presently the rice-hunger that was a thin stream was swelling into a

mighty flood. Fisherfolk needed rice. Craftsman needed rice. And all this while

uprooted people were passing through the village, victims of the Army order of

evacuation’.159 Such emphasis on the forcible extraction of rice, the inept colonial

administration, and the repercussions of the Second World War also appear later in

the works of Bhatia, Jean Drèze, and Sen. Although Sen is right in saying that ‘the

famine was largely a rural phenomenon’,160 he discounts the importance of the

portrayal of racial fear for the Japanese created by the War. In addition to providing

this insight, Bhattacharya suggests that there could have been a possible link between

the national liberation movement and the arrest of thousands of male peasants, which

might have weakened the workforce needed to harvest good produce. Girish and other

traders persuade the villagers to destroy the local post offices in response to the British

soldiers’ desecration of the Gandhian flag. After this act, when the male peasants are

beaten by the police and taken to jail, Girish and the traders force the rest of the

villagers to yield their rice to the government, both as an act of recompense and of

patriotic appeal.161 This episode suggests how the conditions of the famine were

accelerated by the self-serving needs of the traders and middlemen like Girish: the

trader class fabricated a situation of riot in order to exclude male peasants from the

harvest and to seize the villagers’ crops coercively. Both Bhattacharya and Amartya

Sen indicate that inflation was systemically created by a section of traders and

bourgeois within the upper class to support the fiction of wartime demands.162 The

programmatic end of capitalism at first extended the gap between the rural and the

urban economies, then shattered an already deplorable rural economy ridden with

debts and feudal imbalances, expediting the peasants’ long march to the city. This

process evokes Karl Marx’s famous note in Capital I: ‘Capital grows in one place to

a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many’.163

Capital flows with this uneven development, and, as Neil Smith explains, it is most

uneven where capital is most mobile.164 The destitute immigrants in the city of

159 Ibid, p. 105. 160 Sen, Poverty, p. 63. 161 Ibid, p. 102. 162 Sen, Poverty, p. 56. 163 Karl Marx, Capital I, p. 441. 164 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (London: Verso,

2010), p. 199.

52

Calcutta present a picture in which development and deprivation go together,

producing what Smith terms the ‘seesaw of capital’.165 Bhattacharya represents how

this unevenness is manufactured artificially. He offers insights, long before the noted

critical studies on the Bengal famine, on the possible interconnections between capital,

governance, geography, and disaster.

Such rigorous analytical engagement is not always widely found in famine

novels. In Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937), where he holds the colonial British

government and the Irish Repeal Association responsible for manufacturing the Irish

1845-1846 famine, this kind of sustained political-economic reading is lacking.166

Famine is of course an analytical novel, probably the best kind of analytical writing

that realism can offer. But analysis in Bhattacharya is too frequently deployed

(sometimes even the unlearned peasants, such as Kajoli’s father, appear to analyse

complex sociological conditions) which shapes his nature of writing. One of the

reasons for this overwhelming use of analysis may be that Bhattacharya is writing too

close to the event. He worked as a journalist during the period and witnessed the

tragedy firsthand. His expertise in journalism and in academic writing (for his Ph.D.

in contemporary Indian history) supplies him with the rigour and enthusiasm for

academic analysis and with the impetus to explore connections between economic,

political, and social forces, sometimes all at once. O’Flaherty, writing almost a century

later from the famine, appears to have the benefit of hindsight on the historical reasons,

and uses a narrator who knows the conditions well. In fact, like in a realist novel

proper, his narrator anticipates the conditions and foretells the tragedy which seems

impossible for the poor and the vulnerable to see: ‘For the very poor are unable to see

far into the future. If they can make provision for their immediate wants, they are not

greatly troubled by a remote disaster, whose shadow is only beginning to assume shape

on the horizon’.167 Bhattacharya’s narrator is full of force and energy compared to this

calm and slow narration. Irony, as one of the fundamental devices for realist narration,

is conspicuously missing or deliberately unused in Bhattacharya’s novel. In place of

irony, what marks Bhattacharya’s presentist writing is the impulse for documentation

of the famine violence which is almost ethnographic in nature. In no other novels of

165 Ibid, p. 197. 166 Liam O’Flaherty, Famine (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2002); an exemplary passage is the discussions

between Father Roche and Gleeson in chapter XVI. 167 O’Flaherty, Famine, p. 56.

53

this famine do we find such vivid and graphic descriptions of famine violence.168

Consider a few images. At an early stage of the famine in the village Baruni, a woman

is shown to dig up a trench and bury a child alive. As Kajoli’s mother intervenes, she

cries and says, ‘“Poor godling, so hurt with hunger! Look, my breasts have no milk”

– lifting the tatters that half covered her bosom – “he has no throat to cry. If he sleeps

a little! Where is sleep? He’s hurt all the time with hunger. In his cool earth bed he

can close his eyes, sleep.”’169 She tries to bury the child because living with a baby

under such physical oppression while her fisherman husband is jailed for participation

in the national liberation movement is impossible. In another episode, when the

villagers decide to emigrate to Calcutta, Kajoli comes across the scene where ‘a

woman lay stretched by the tree-trunk, groaning while a jackal crouched and ate her

body’.170 In the city, the images are even more horrible: the destitute fighting with

each other over food from garbage cans, spreading of various diseases (dysentery the

most common among them), bodies going unwashed, people struggling over a bowl

of gruel, and famished pot-bellied skeletal people traversing the city like ghosts.171 Set

one after another and appearing like snapshots, these images remind us of the

juxtaposition technique in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath172 or the strategy of

‘recognition’ in Bijan Bhattacharya’s famine play Nabanna (New Harvest; 1944).173

These writers used these techniques to state the contradictory pictures of wealth and

poverty, the class-based nature of the disaster, and to push the urban middle-class

readers to confront their criminal acts of silence and complacency. Bhattacharya’s

rendering is also directed at these aspects. He borrows these images from the widely

circulating newspapers.174 These popular images made it easier for him to connect to

168 In Bibhutibhushan’s Ashani Sanket, the famine is about to take place, while in Manik’s Chintamani,

the famine is mostly in the background. See Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ashani Sanket (Kolkata:

Mitra and Ghosh, 2012); Manik Bandyopadhyay, ‘Chintamani’, in Manik Bandyopadhyay

Rachonasamagra, ed. by Alok Ray et al. (Kolkata: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2007), pp. 239-86. 169 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 126. 170 Ibid, p. 145. 171 Ibid, p. 164-78. 172 See the narrative technique of elongation and escalation in chapters 7 and 8 of the novel, The Grapes

of Wrath (London: Penguin, 2000). 173 The theatre critic Nandi Bhatia tells us that Bijon Bhattacharya represents the stark differences in

urban socio-economic conditions during the famine by juxtaposing two contradictory socio-economic

pictures (wealth and poverty) on stage, and, with control over light, asking us to recognise the historical

and contemporary nature of class dominance. She calls it a ‘recognition’ technique. Bhatia, Acts of

Authority, Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in Colonial and Post-colonial India (Ann Arbour:

University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 87. 174 As a journalist, Bhattacharya was well aware of the coverage of famine violence in such newspapers

as The Statesman, The Hindusthan Standard, The Associated Press, etc. (many of which appeared in

54

the urban public and express his anger, while the deep melodramatic tone of writing

helped him exploit the pathos of the situation. This is missing from O’Flaherty’s175

and others’ work. This ethnographic impulse may also have its roots in Bhattacharya’s

troubles as a writer (as he turned from being an historian and journalist into a fiction

writer), namely, his anxieties regarding how to understand and represent the logic and

immensity of the tragedy. The image of a jackal eating a human alive is the blurring

of all values that constitute society, the conditions of co-habiting between humans and

non-humans. In a famine-stricken world, life is exposed to death from all quarters. In

listing these horrific images, Bhattacharya, thus, shows what he considers a novelist

must have – ‘keen observation’ skills and deep sympathy for the situation.176 A

novelist born in times of a huge social crisis cannot avoid the everyday scenes of

horror neither can he or she avoid the documentation of such horror for raising

sympathy and awareness. Observation, criticism, and sympathy thus become integral

elements of disaster writing. Through his analytical-journalistic mode of writing, he

makes the novel a genre of socially urgent ethnographic documentation. The novel’s

documentary nature recalls, in particular, Émile Zola’s descriptions of the horrifying

working and living conditions and scenes of social violence in the Montsou coal mine

in his novel Germinal, as it also brings to mind Zola’s naturalist concept of the novel

as ‘scientific’ report with segments of society in the novel’s petri-dish.177

But novel writing in a time of disaster is not only about analysis and

description. It is also about ethical issues, humanistic concerns, and, above all,

reflection on the modes of representation. Reporting receives a new meaning in this

novel through discussions on art, language, and representation. When the famine

the popular critical anthologies by social scientists such as Tarak Chandra Das, Kali Charan Ghosh, and

others). For a note on this, see Kali Charan Ghosh, Famines, pp. 85-95. 175 Compare the more restrained and embodied representation of violence in O’Flaherty: ‘In her

[Sally’s] eyes was that dreadful famine look; the scared stare of an animal’ (p. 326); or as Thomsy

describes the herd of migrating, disease-stricken, starved people, ‘I got tidings of a body of men and I

met several bodies of men, but they were all bodies of men wandering with hunger and not men on their

keeping at all’ (p. 368). 176 In his interview with Sudhakar Joshi, Bhattacharya stated, ‘I hold that a novel must have a social

purpose. It must place before the reader something from a society’s point of view. Art is not necessarily

for art’s sake. Purposeless art and literature which is much in vogue does not appear to me a sound

judgement’. Qtd. in K. R. Chandrasekharan, Bhabani Bhattacharya, p. 3. 177 For the metaphor that sees the novelist as a doctor anatomising a body and the novel as a decision-

making tool, see Émile Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays,

trans. by Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), pp. 1-56; for the descriptions in

Germinal, see specifically the passages (part three, chapters four and five) on the coalminer’s strike in

the novel. Zola, Germinal, 1885, trans. by Roger Pearson (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 175-97.

55

breaks out in the city and corpses are everywhere on the street, Rahoul finds in a busy

railway station an artist drawing the sketch of a child suckling off a dead mother. The

scene invites commuters who gradually turn into an agitated mob accusing the artist

of his neglected duties. After being asked by the station master why has he not

‘reported’ the incident to them, the artist replies ‘What am I doing but trying to make

a report? Not to the railway people. I have to report to India’.178 Reminding us of

famine artists like Chittoprasad, Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, who sketched the

horrors of the famine and published them in national dailies to critique the

unscrupulous and incomprehensibly callous British response to the event,179 the scene

also hints at a related question such acts may incur in society, namely, the accusation

against the artist for being a negligent, profit-seeking, insensitive human being. Quite

expectedly, the mob starts lynching him. Bhattacharya writes, ‘He was a pathetic sight,

buttons ripped from his tunic, undervest revealed, but there was fire in his eyes’.180 As

Rahul collects and hands over his pencil and sketching pad to him, thrown in the rail-

track, the enraged artist first asserts the importance of the act to Rahoul and then

speaks in a voice ‘heavy with emotion’: ‘I can’t bear the sight [of the mother’s corpse].

Sickening. You think I’m a brute?’181 There is a dual meaning of report here – of

professional duty and of ethical concern. Would the report to a station-master be

enough in this mammoth outbreak of violence? The reporter’s duty is not only to

identify and write/post about this single incident of tragedy, but to render the

underlying structures that compel these situations, to inform the wider public of the

catastrophic nature of the situation, and to make them feel guilty for their negligence

and compel them to take steps about the situation. At the same time, reporting is also

a question of the ethical value of producing art. Could an artist stay away from the

sensibilities and emotions of humans while manufacturing art in a time of greater

historical crisis? The narrator captures in the artist’s sickening feelings a subjective

attachment to the event: ‘Rahoul stared at him. The artist had lost his detachment, and,

with detachment, vision. He seethed with human feeling’.182 Clearly, it is a complex

task to produce art in a time of catastrophe. There is a further complexity added to this

178 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 162. 179 For a reading on this, see Nikhil Sarkar, A Matter of Conscience: Artists Bear Witness to the Great

Bengal Famine of 1943 (Calcutta: Punascha, 1998). 180 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 163. 181 Ibid, p. 164. 182 Ibid, p. 164.

56

in the next statement: ‘Rahoul heaved an unhappy sigh. It seemed to him as though

the dead mother on the platform nursing her tiny one now died for the second time’.183

The narrator seems to suggest that with subjective and emotional attachment, artistic

representation of a catastrophic crisis becomes hindered or distorted. This act of self-

reflexivity brings us back to the fundamental dilemma in catastrophe-based art: how

does one tackle the material issues of an immediate horrible tragedy and reflect upon

the tragedy at the same time? This is a problem that, as we noted, Bijan Bhattacharya

among others was also going through before writing the play, Nabanna. This is not a

question that only the narrator had thrown at us; Bhattacharya himself faced similar

dilemmas and difficulties when he made the turn to become a writer from a different

profession. He believed that ‘a novel must have a social purpose’ which the author

achieves through the ‘right use’ of the elements of language and emotions.184 The right

use is the good balance between objective and subjective elements. Art born of a great

historical crisis cannot be entirely objective. It needs to pay attention to people’s pain,

trauma, and suffering, and allow for a therapeutic purpose. The novel responds to the

subjective element through a localisation of emotion.

Hungers creates the world of affect through its variations of language: there

are certain words which are idiosyncratic Bangla expressions for care and empathy,

and passages which quintessentially stand for humanistic concerns.185 On a number of

occasions, the novel uses the word ‘a-ha-reh’ by Kajoli’s mother for an orphan whom

she feeds.186 This expression in colloquial Bangla stands for motherly empathy and

love for the other, and implies knowledge in another human’s suffering and a possible

resolution through human warmth, intimacy, and affection. Also, ‘Ma! Ma-go-ma!’,187

uttered by the famine victims everywhere in the streets for a sip of rice-water,

expresses the pathos and trivialisation of the crisis. The word ‘Ma’ in Bangla stands

183 Ibid, p. 164. 184 As he writes in an essay, ‘Literature and Social Reality’ (first published in the journal, The Aryan

Path in 1955), art is about reflecting upon crises in society and projecting possible courses of action:

‘Art must teach, but unobtrusively, by its vivid interpretation of life. Art must preach, but only by virtue

of its being a vehicle of truth. If that is propaganda, there is no need to eschew that word’. See Bhabani

Bhattacharya, ‘Literature and Social Reality’, in Perspectives on Bhabani Bhattacharya, ed. by Ramesh

K. Srivastava (Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1982), pp. 1-6 (p. 4). 185 For reasons of space here I cannot do justice to the huge issue of language politics, which is a

fundamental dilemma for post-independence writers of English, and is deeply intertwined with issues

of catastrophe, crisis, and late-colonial Indian history. The issue will be tackled, however, when the

chapter is revised and restructured for my planned monograph. 186 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 84. 187 Ibid, p. 173.

57

for mother. The wailing for rice contains an expectation of extending motherly love to

the orphan-like victims. These expressions compel Bhattacharya to use a second-

person narrative in a manner that is both affective and censorious: ‘You heard it day

in, day out, every hour, every minute […] You hated the hideous monotony of the

wail. You hardened yourself against the wail. The destitutes became a race apart,

insensitive, subhuman’.188 There is as much empathy as there is criticism of society in

these lines. The second-person narrative becomes appropriate to point a finger at the

irresponsible and ‘insensitive’ middle-class society (there is a chiasmic turn in that

retort and it includes the middle-class writer, Bhattacharya himself). At the same time,

it conjures up a greater need for humanism and love for the other in a time of social

and moral crisis. In an episode where Kajoli’s brother Onu is seen fighting with a

‘mangy’ dog for food, Onu wins the battle and then shares the food with it.189 The love

for the other that is hinted at in those idiomatic expressions is enlarged and

transformed into an ethics of living during the time of disaster. Despite showing Onu’s

selfishness, Bhattacharya restores the animalistic need for food through the principle

of love for the other, suggesting in the act the contemporary Gandhian meaning of

sacrifice for the nation.190 These techniques allow him to build a humanistic realism –

a realism that represents the crisis of the society only to be dialectically resolved in a

socialist world. As Bhattacharya stated in an interview about the use of local words,

‘I have used such words as a technical device to heighten the sense of reality or, in

some instances, to deepen characterization or simply to add a certain flavor’.191

Bhattacharya knew that it would be difficult to bring to the terrain of English the

specific linguistic idiosyncrasies and emotional expressions required here.192 But he

188 Ibid, p. 173; compare this episode with a similar one in Bijan Bhattacharya’s play, Nabanna, where

Kunja is bitten by a dog while fighting against it for food at a garbage, and his wife Radhika, who is

also scavenging, runs to him and bandages his wounds, while hurling abuse at the dog and feeling pity

for both of them. This scene occurs outside of an upper-class wedding venue, where people are wasting

food and discussing black market profits from the famine. See Bijan Bhattacharya, Nabanna (Kolkata:

Dey’s, 2004), p. 77. 189 Ibid, p. 178. 190 Bhattacharya believed in a purposeful art that has a Gandhian socialist objective. See particularly

his book, Gandhi, the Writer. 191 ‘I have not done that to educate my foreign readers. A creative writer does not try to educate. I have

used such words as a technical device to heighten the sense of reality or, in some instances, to deepen

characterization or simply to add a certain flavor. Apart from using Bengali or Hindi words in the

original, I have sometimes used their literal English translation, even if it is contrary to English usage

or idiom’ (p. 301). See Bhabani Bhattacharya, ‘An Interview with Bhabani Bhattacharya’, intr. by Janet

P. Gemmill, World Literature Written in English, 14.2 (1975), pp. 300-09. 192 In the interview in Mahfil, he states, ‘The novelist writing in English has to tackle the problem of

dialogue. That is perhaps the most difficult of all. He has to keep the “Indianness” of speech while

writing correct English. Even to render in English a certain thought-idiom common to the Indian mind

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also knew through his commitment to Marxism and to the social dimensions of

literature that it is only through a proper understanding and exploitation of the

historically specific conjuncture of the local that a dialectic between the local and the

global can be meaningfully built. If disaster inspires writers to produce analyses and

expositions of global systems of oppression, it also requires a release of pain through

the sympathetic and humane reporting of the local aspects of the tragedy.193

Finally, Bhattacharya’s use of gender and political leadership requires

attention for our discussion. Margaret Kelleher has covered the issue of rape and

gendered exploitation during the famine in her book The Feminization of Famine

(1997).194 To this study I add Bhattacharya’s thoughts on the bourgeois moral crisis –

the tensions between expectations and reality in anti-colonial nationalism. During

Kajoli’s march to the city, she was rescued from being eaten by a jackal by an Indian

soldier fighting the War. He gives her food and picks her up, looking for her family.

Suddenly he feels the impulse to have sex with Kajoli’s half-naked body.

Bhattacharya’s narrator says:

The soldier was a man of feeling. But he desperately needed a woman. It was

a year since he had seen his wife. And in this instant he was back home with

his wife. He could barely see Kajoli’s face in the dark, but he knew the smell

that was ever with her – the clean woman smell, like rain-wet earth that was

part of her. He spoke words of caress, words lain buried in his feelings.195

Afterwards the soldier feels guilty and gets Kajoli hospitalised in Calcutta. K. R.

Chandrasekharan, one of the first critics of Bhattacharya’s work, writes that ‘a careful

reading of the episode [the first incident] makes it abundantly clear that she was raped

[…] At the same time the incident is placed in such a context that neither of the two

persons involved deserves unqualified blame’.196 That Chandrasekharan finds it

difficult to blame the soldier seems to be based on Bhattacharya’s efforts at

becomes a big task, since the English language has a “genius” of its own. Even the novelist writing in

Indian vernaculars has to face a similar problem. How to render in literary language the speech of

common people without making mincemeat of grammar?’ (p. 47). 193 That the novel was highly successful in rendering the particular and the historical can be understood

by the fact that it was translated into more than twenty European languages. See Shimer, Bhabani, p.

34. 194 See Kelleher, Feminization, pp. 162-221. 195 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 150. 196 Chandrasekharan, Bhabani, p. 22.

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humanising the soldier (his sexual/biological need) and his remarks on his ‘good’

character in getting Kajoli hospitalised.197 The complexity of categorisation (the rape)

appears to arise from what Bhattacharya sees as an ethical confusion of sexual demand

and moral standards in times of need. In order to situate a nationalist ideology,

Bhattacharya’s narrator seems to give rape the linguistic registers of biological need.

But as Kelleher argues, the soldier’s act is symbolic of patriarchy where philanthropy

follows injustice.198 Bhattacharya’s treatment of the issue also makes his narrator (and

by implication him as well) complicit in this colonial system of injustice. At the same

time, it would, however, be wrong not to acknowledge Bhattacharya’s condemnation

of the native upper-class bourgeois characters for their callous response to, and

shameless exploitation of, the famine conditions. In a meeting on rice-hoarding by the

city businessmen, Sir Abalabandhu, a highly respected native who runs black market

rackets in pharmaceuticals and pays the government handsome tax returns, tells his

friends including Samarendra about another friend who preys on young girls. He

justifies his friend’s gruesome acts: ‘That girl would have starved otherwise. Starved,

thinned into a skeleton, and died. My friend treated her with great kindness and

consideration. He paid her very generously, I can tell you – much more than she had

the right to claim’.199 Bhattacharya presents and condemns many such characters who

profited from the famine conditions and helped frame the rise of prostitution in the

city. His hesitation in speaking about rape seems to come from his unwillingness to

push the bourgeois moral crisis further. As Rajender Kaur has recently written, ‘[t]he

only way these texts [So Many Hungers! and He Who Rides a Tiger] can contain the

crisis is by deflecting attention, so that the revolution that takes place is the glorious

one of national independence, which promises to be the cure for all ills and

injustices’.200 Bhattacharya was well aware of the historical origins of the famine –

colonial capitalism and imperialist war. In order to fight those factors and the

197 However, Chandrasekharan’s words, ‘neither of the two persons involved deserves unqualified

blame’, make Kajoli partly responsible for the rape too. Chandrasekhar, who reads Bhattacharya

sympathetically, thinks that Kajoli’s naked and unprotected body in the dead of the night provokes the

soldier, who is far away from his wife and sexual pleasure. This is an orthodox, conservative, and

patriarchal reading of rape and gender injustice. I think this reading also should neither be detached

from the context of the novel, which represents a time of dire social and gender crisis, nor from the

context of Chandrasekharan’s reading in the early 1970s when gender movements in a recently liberated

India from colonial rule were still in their early stages. 198 Kelleher, Feminization, p. 202. 199 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 182. 200 Kaur, p. 277.

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imminence of historically produced disasters, he knew that a nation would need a

united and formidable bourgeois leadership. Not only are his main characters (Rahoul

and Devata) bourgeois male intellectuals promulgating nationalism, but his ‘shaping

vision’ is also the Nehru-Gandhi philosophy of a nation ruled primarily by the

bourgeoisie. The proletariat, he suggests, would always need an important educated

mediator to authorise their rights and entitlements.201 Unlike the publication of

Tarashankar’s or Manik’s novels, this novel was published a month after the

independence (1947). The decade of the 1940s was deeply ravaged by different kinds

of disasters, war, famine, revolts, communal riots, and anti-colonial movements. The

very event of independence was also bloodied by the momentous decision of the

Partition of India. The unending national suffering needed a safety valve of release.

Thus the ending of the novel shows a utopian concept of nation-building where the

male intellectuals, prior to independence, have finally turned the peasants and workers

into conscientious agents. In the final scenes of the novel, Kajoli, who was sold to a

brothel, escapes from it and is seen to sell newspapers on the streets inspired by

people’s (especially her family’s and Devata’s) participation in the national liberation

movement and their sustained endurance of physical pain. The narrator also notes that

the other protagonist, Rahoul, a bourgeois intellectual, has joined the movement and

been arrested by the police. It is through their consciousness of and sacrifice for the

nationalist cause that, Bhattacharya suggests, a socialist state can be built in the near

future.

Scholars have criticised this abrupt ending and the general structure of the

novel. C. Paul Varughese, for instance, writes that ‘An artist, who turns recent events

into fiction, cannot easily succeed; for the unconscious mind requires much time to

perform its wonder of transmuting incidents into art’.202 What they seem to miss in

these conventional understandings of art is that a disaster does call for certain

immediate and long-term changes and mutations within existing forms of

representational art. The question is not whether the novel comes out as a wonderfully

structured art, but rather what levels of rupture in cognition does the novelist have to

201 In the case of He Who Rides a Tiger, we see the illiterate Kalo teaching himself the Western

principles of scientific thinking from her daughter’s school-books. This paves way to his being placed

in the bourgeois sphere later, and allows the possibility of anti-bourgeois, anti-colonial subaltern

leadership to take place, albeit briefly. 202 Varughese qtd in Chandrasekharan, Bhabani, p. 9.

61

go through in order to address the huge cataclysm and trauma as a witness or a

contemporary. Writing immediately after the famine, Bhattacharya’s novel was meant

to play the role of both a historical document and a literary medium that negotiates

with the collective tragedy. In order to do that, he shifts registers, sometimes very

quickly, from the historical and the political-economic, to journalistic, ethnographic,

linguistic, and ethical-philosophical ones, and suggests powerfully that famine as a

particular kind of disaster requires the use of these resources. At the same time, he

could hardly dispense with his bourgeois, male-gendered political ideal in a time of

India’s entrance to the post-independence, postcolonial period. Through the

predominant use of this analytical-affective mode, he reminded us that independence

was preceded by a dire moment of historical crisis, and that to challenge and tackle

the issues born of this crisis, we would need a visionary politics of humanistic ideals

and uniform leadership.

Scarcity, Starvation and the Postcolonial Indian Literary

Imagination: Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve

But these ideals could hardly be materialised in the postcolonial period which saw

several chapters of food crisis, drought, and famine. Most of the novels written in this

period either refer to or are based on topics of food and scarcity.203 Bhattacharya’s

next novel, Music for Mohini (1952),204 has extended discussions on food and poverty,

while his third novel, He Who Rides a Tiger (1954), revisits the Bengal famine and

narrativises the suffering and tribulations of a lower-caste rural protagonist, Kalo.

Since famine appears as a background in this novel, the modal improvisation – the use

of analytical style, journalistic techniques, and varied linguistic-affective registers –

in the previous novel is missing here. In R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958),205 the

railway-guide Raju, having experienced everything from penury and starvation to

wealth, fraudulence, and imprisonment, is turned into a saint by the rural population

due to his bearded face and renunciatory mode of living in a remote place in the village

of Mangal. The villagers want him to go through the saintly ordeals and bring rain to

203 C. Paul Varughese comments that food becomes a dominant metaphor and formal principle as it is

of primary importance for questions of human dignity and humanity. See Varughese qtd in Anil Kumar

Bhatnagar, Kamala Markandaya: A Thematic Study (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 1995), p. 19. 204 Bhattacharya, Music for Mohini (London: Crown Publishers, 1952). 205 R. K. Narayan, The Guide (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006).

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this drought-ravaged land. Narayan describes how crime, death, and violence rise in

the village due to the lack of food. The novel ends as Raju, standing in a dry river and

praying to God, collapses, whispering that the rains are coming, that he can feel the

cold water running beneath his feet. Food, starvation, and scarcity appear to be the

organising principles of the narrative here, which force sainthood upon Raju and

compel Narayan to use the various narrative strategies of prolepsis and analepsis, free

indirect discourse, irony, and mythical interpolation to build Raju’s past and relate it

to the present where he is given the chance to absolve his guilt through the sainthood

discourse.206 In another novel, Mulk Raj Anand’s The Road (1961),207 which is based

on the problem of roads and transportation in a newly independent India, tells the story

of Bhikhu who works feverishly to earn money so that he can provide a day’s meal

for his family. These novels use the first- or third-person narratives and free indirect

discourse to show how social and historical forces compel the lower- and middle-class

characters to struggle for food, starvation, and death in a newly-independent nation.

Since independence brings little change for the lower classes in socio-economic

conditions or is unable to guarantee even the most fundamental right in postcolonial

democracy – the right to food – there is an abundance of disillusionment and dejection

in the narratives, rendered through the stylistic device of irony and the juxtaposition

of contradictory images and motifs.208 This kind of writing, using art as a medium for

direct and critical engagement with the oppressive structures of society and for finding

possibilities to overcome them, rose to international prominence during the Great

Depression era and came to be known widely as the social realist narrative.

International writers such as Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le

Sueur, John Dos Passos, Jack London, George Orwell, Margaret Harkness, and Indian

writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, Premchand, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, and others

variously contributed to the enriching of this mode of writing. It would be wrong,

however, as David Tucker has shown, to assume that there is any fundamental

206 For a reading on the complex narrative techniques in the novel, see Krishna Sen, Critical Essays on

R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), pp. 8-25, pp. 65-120. Although Sen

talks at length about the representation of social reality, she misses the points on hunger and food.

Indeed, food and hunger have rarely been discussed as form-giving elements for the novel. 207 Mulk Raj Anand, The Road (Bombay: Kutub Popular, 1967). 208 For a study of theme and structure in post-independence novels, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, The

Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques in the Indian Novel in English (Delhi: Arnold Heinemann,

1971).

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homogeneity in the use of social realism.209 What is argued here on the other hand is

that scarcity and starvation, the most immediate and widely visible truths in post-

independence India, compel the production of a particular realist mode of loss and

suffering, which is different from that of the novels that engage directly with a disaster

or revisit the conditions of the disaster. There are many similarities in the narrative

treatments of personal loss or in the authors’ attitudes and perceptions, but there are

also fundamental differences in the organisation of formal principles or in the use of

structural devices or modal preferences. I will substantiate these arguments with a

brief observation on a novel by Kamal Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve (1954).210

Nectar in a Sieve is Markandaya’s first novel, which instantly brought fame to

the novelist.211 It is about the story of Rukmani, a peasant woman who recounts her

post-marital life of living under the socio-economic conditions of landless agriculture,

industrialisation, and drought, her forced migration to the city, and the perennial desire

within a peasant’s mind to get back to her village and family. The novel is shaped by

food discourses throughout – every chapter of the novel refers to aspects of cultivation,

vegetable-growing, rice, irrigation, healthy bodies, eating, etc. The focal point changes

to starvation, skeletal figures, and philosophical thoughts on hunger, as drought and

inflation ravage the unnamed village. Markandaya very clearly indicates that there are

two economic forces responsible for the plight of the peasant family – landless farming

and industrialisation. Nathan is a landless farmer who pays his land rents via a

contractor to an unknown landlord and lives off the land’s produce. But a flood,

followed by a long drought, destroys his crops for successive years and prevents him

from paying his rent resulting finally in the loss of his land. Very early on in the novel,

Rukmani tells the readers that her husband, like her father too, does not own the land

but they save satisfactorily from the harvests: ‘From each harvest we saved, and had

209 Social realism is often understood as interchangeable with socialist realism. There are important

convergences as there are crucial differences. For a study based on Britain, see British Social Realism

in the Arts since 1940, ed. by David Tucker (London: Palgrave, 2011). 210 Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve (Bombay: Jaico, 1956). 211 Almost all her critics acknowledge this – which also partly supports the argument that this form of

writing in the aftermath of the independence had a ready audience and a welcoming creative

atmosphere. At the same time, she was accused of orientalist tendencies and pandering to the West in

her rendering of poverty and hunger. As Rosemary M. George writes, ‘In India by the mid-1970s,

Markandaya’s reputation became fixed as a rootless and reclusive writer who had catered to the West

in a series of novels that were deemed overly poverty fixated, sexually explicit, exotic recreations of

India or of foreigners in Europe’; see George, ‘Where in the World did Kamala Markandaya Go?’,

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 42.3 (2009), pp. 400-09 (p. 406).

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gunny-sacks full of the husked rice stored away in our small stone-lined granary. There

was food plenty’.212 But this comfortable situation turns into tragedy due to successive

‘natural calamities’. A land that Nathan has been tilling for generations is gone in a

moment, and he becomes professionally crippled. Forced to migrate to an unnamed

city, he mourns the tragic loss of his ‘ancestral’ land and worries that he is not skilled

to do any job in a city: ‘This city is no place for me, I am lost in it. And I am too old

to learn to like it’.213 He eventually dies there. This situation points to the plight of

millions of peasants who did not have, and continue to not have, a land of their own

and had to work as bonded labourers, sharecroppers, or tenant farmers. Although

Markandaya does not specify the time period for her novel, her references to a British

doctor named Kenny and the building of a tannery in a village allude to the social

context in late-colonial India. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, a number of

novels by Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, A. Bapiraju,

Gojananda T. Madkholkar, Nanak Singh, and others, point out the similar socio-

economic consequences of industrialisation in the colony – the dismantling of rural

society, the loss of land for tenant farmers, and forced migration to suburbs and cities

in post-First World War India, and so on.214 Nathan and Rukmani’s migration and

Nathan’s death are tragic expressions of the economic shift from a dominant

agricultural mode of production (with its social hierarchies where farmers are

dependent on the landlord for land) to the mode of industrialisation (where farming

becomes either increasingly limited or highly sophisticated). Markandaya’s narrative

style is shaped by this stage and nature of modernisation, as it bears similarities with

Bhattacharya’s work in responding to the long agrarian crisis and the social conditions

of late-colonial modernity.

Industrialisation is mainly depicted here through the building of a tannery in

the village precincts. Rukmani shows her displeasure at the tannery from the

beginning. She is aware of the better income she earns from the vegetables she grows

in her backyard, for the tannery and the demands of its city-bred people have doubled

the prices of vegetables and everyday commodities in the village; yet she is saddened

by the fact that her relation with the flattering and loving client, Old Granny, is over

212 Markandaya, Nectar, p. 7. 213 Ibid, p. 177. 214 For a discussion, see Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature, p. 296.

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now. 215 Ironically, inflation in price helps the villagers in the beginning, but as the

drought continues, the prices of rice and other food soar due to hoarding and black-

marketing, preventing them from buying any food. Along with the tannery comes the

urban lifestyle – the rowdy street life, the shops and money culture, the din and bustle

of the factory – which for Rukmani spoils the traditional rural culture and ecosystem.

Rukmani reflects at one point that she cannot hear any bird songs these days, ‘for the

tanner lay close–except crows and kites and such scavenging birds, eager for the

town’s offal’.216 Although she, an educated village woman, is concerned about these

environmental and economic issues, her peers, Kunthi, Janaki, Kali, and others find

these concerns ‘queer’, and ‘stupid’.217 Indeed, some of them support the decisions by

the village’s youth to join the factory, to save money and enjoy the new lifestyle.

Through Kunthi, Markandaya also shows how women are seduced by the tannery men

for money and ornaments, or are forced into sex trade in exchange for food during the

drought (Rukmini’s daughter Ira goes through this tragic experience218). The tannery

also brings a rising culture of crime. The tannery owners make stricter laws against

workers’ rights, working hours, wage payment, and stealing. Rukmani’s eldest sons,

conscious of their workers’ rights, fall prey to these laws and are suspended

(eventually journeying to Sri Lanka for jobs), while another son is killed for allegedly

stealing from the factory during the drought. So, the tannery is not understood here as

a disturbance to the rural life system, but as one that totally dismantles the villagers’

lives, that actively reshapes their values, that turns them to be dependent on its mode

of production, and that throws them away during crises, stripping them of their last

resources of hope and leading to the disintegration of their family.219

215 Markandaya, Nectar, pp. 47-48. 216 Ibid, p. 69. 217 Ibid, p. 29, p. 46. 218 Ibid, p. 98-100. 219 Also see in the context, Markandaya’s novel, A Handful of Rice (1967) (New Delhi: Orient

paperbacks, 1985), which is located again in an unknown city and in an unspecific time period and has

strong correspondences to the late-colonial period. Unlike the conditions of landlessness and drought

that produce hunger in Nectar, hunger here is manufactured by the hoarding of rice and of other

essential commodities by corrupt traders like Damodar. Markandaya also shows the essentially

connected economic conditions of village and city lives in the capitalist mode of production. For

instance, in a diegetic narration about Ravi, the protagonist who has escaped his hereditary role of being

a farmer for better living and earning prospects in the city, Markandaya’s narrator tells us, ‘Bad Harvest

[…] Ravi felt very tired. He thought he had cut clear of all that, very simply by walking out; now here

was the slimy tentacle reaching out from the sodden paddy-fields of endless abject villages to clutch at

him in the middle of a town’ (emphasis in original; p. 205).

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In order to show how landlessness and industrialisation force the tenant farmer

into tragic predicaments, Markandaya uses a mode of narration where memoir writing

and discursive thinking on hunger converge. The novel begins with Rukmani’s

thoughts that she can still distinctly remember the days of her marriage forty years

earlier. But then it turns to take up the past tense predominantly to record her life-

story, until resorting again to the present tense to put closure to the narrative (recalling

the narrative technique in Narayan’s The Guide, although Narayan’s is a third-person

narrative). Since Rukmani can write in English,220 this first-person narrative creates

the sense that she is writing her own memoir. In this short memoir, she decides to

highlight certain events and skip certain others. Sometimes, years have passed within

the gap of two sentences or two chapters (chapter one ends as Rukmani, a bride, arrives

at Nathan’s house, while chapter two begins with the birth of her first child. Between

chapters two and six, fourteen years have passed.). This structuring has caused critics

to doubt Markandaya’s skill in narrative construction.221 However, I think that through

such construction, which purposefully relates hunger to temporality, Markandaya is

trying to demonstrate how starvation is artificially manufactured in the rural societies

and how a body adjusts to the conditions of hunger. These thematic desires and

treatments compel a discursive engagement with hunger which is executed through

the mode of the personalised memoir. Consider this passage:

For hunger is a curious thing: at first it is with you all the time, waking and

sleeping and in your dreams, and your belly cries out insistently, and there is

a gnawing and a pain as if your very vitals were being devoured, and you must

stop it at any cost, and you buy a moment’s respite even while you know and

fear the sequel. Then the pain is no longer sharp but dull, and this too is with

you always, so that you think of food many times a day and each time a terrible

sickness assails you, and became (sic) you know this you try to avoid the

thought, but you cannot, it is with you. Then that too is gone, all pain, all desire,

only a great emptiness is left, like the sky, like a well in drought, and it is now

that the strength from your limbs, and you try to rise and find you cannot, or

220 She will use this skill in the city and write letters for people to earn money so that Nathan and she

can go back to their village. Markandaya, Nectar, p. 167-68. 221 For instance, M. K. Bhatnagar thinks Markandaya’s novels are riddled with ‘superficialities and

inauthenticities’, while Mohan Jha suggests that her works deserve only a ‘hasty reading’. There are

also critics such as Margaret P. Joseph who engage sympathetically with Markandaya and thinks that

the challenges in her structures and the openness in her conclusions are ‘uncompromisingly realistic’

in their rendering of reality. See, M. K. Bhatnagar, Kamala Markandaya (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2002),

p. 3; Mohan Jha, ‘Indian Novels in English: Notes and Suggestion’, in The Indian English Novel of the

New Millennium, ed. by Prabhat K. Singh (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,

2013), pp. 36-44 (p. 39); see also in this context M. K. Naik who speaks about the ‘superficialities’ in

A Handful of Rice, in A History of Indian English Literature, p. 237; Margaret P. Joseph, Kamala

Markandaya (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1980), p. 65.

67

to swallow water and your throat is powerless, and both the swallow and the

effort of retaining the liquid tax you to the uttermost.222

This passage brings to mind immediately Knut Hamsun’s descriptions of the physical

suffering of an unnamed and hungry artist in his novel Hunger (1890),223 or more

recently a passage from Aki Ollikainen’s novel of the 1866-68 Finnish famine, White

Hunger (2012) where the narrator, through the child Mataleena’s consciousness,

compares hunger to a struggling kitten trapped in a sack to be thrown into an icy

lake.224 Hunger is understood here as a being, an actively working part of the body –

something that we carry with us every day, but something that also devours us as it

grows. In this, it is given a parasitic dimension, eating not only the internal organs of

the body, but also what is left of the body itself, destroying the entire organic system.

The only remedy is food, but food does not help the body regain strength. It just makes

the body duller, until the body gradually empties out of strength and hunger becomes

a phenomenon of the mind, creating illusions of strength, food, and resources. This

embodied nature of hunger has been powerfully covered in Maud Ellmann’s work,

The Hunger Artists (1993), where Ellmann notes how artists use hunger and anorexia

to register their resistant political statement.225 The narration of the passage in

Markandaya offers further insight into hunger. The narration appears to be full of

confidence, as if the narrator were fully aware of hunger and its stages, their everyday

presence in the peasants’ lives. The sentences have a motional state, a speedy syntax

– long sentences divided into smaller parts joined by commas or colons. This indicates

the different states and processes that the body has to go through when sieged by

hunger. Also note the constant use of second-person narrative, where the reader is

included in the narrator’s discourse as one who fully and assertively participates in the

222 Markandaya, Nectar, pp. 87-88. 223 See Knut Hamsum, Hunger, trans. by Sverre Lyngstad (New York: Penguin, 1998). Compare the

protagonist’s thoughts here, ‘During this fruitless effort my thoughts began to get confused again—I

felt my brain literally snap, my head was emptying and emptying, and in the end it sat light and void

on my shoulders. I perceived this gaping emptiness in my head with my whole body’ (p. 28); or, ‘I

seemed to have become too feeble to steer or guide myself where I wanted to go; a swarm of tiny vermin

had forced its way inside me and hollowed me out’ (p. 17). 224 Compare the narration: ‘Hunger is the kitten Willow-Lauri put in a sack, which scratches away with

its small claws, causing searing pain; then more scratching, then more, until the kitten is exhausted and

falls to the bottom of the sack, weighing heavily there, before gathering its strength and starting a fresh

struggle. You want to lift the animal out, but it scratches so hard you dare not reach inside. You have

no option but to carry the bundle to the lake and throw it into the hole in the ice’. Aki Ollikainen, White

Hunger, trans. by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah (London: Peirene Press, 2015), pp. 46-47. 225 Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, & Imprisonment (London: Virago, 1993).

68

discussion. The reader is supposed to know these stages because everyone suffers from

hunger, either for small or prolonged periods, especially if the reader is from the

ex/colonised societies where hunger, drought, and malnutrition predominate. There is

also the use of sharp and evocative imagery. The dried nature of the body in hunger,

the emptying out of strength, is compared with the sky or a dry well in drought. While

the sky is a standard metaphor for suggesting emptiness, a dry well is a pointed one,

for it most painfully suggests that there is no water anywhere: the rivers and ponds

have dried up, and there is no rain; even the well, which has been dug very deep to

store water artificially, has succumbed to the same condition. Without water, the body

realises that it is dying in parts, and that even a temporary availability of water only

worsens the condition. These are some philosophical realisations regarding hunger,

presented through the use of an improvised structure and pointed imagery. While some

of these structures do appear in Bhattacharya’s novel (recall for instance the stock

market scene), the philosophical and biological aspects of the discussions are largely

missing in his work. I would argue that Bhattacharya, a historian and journalist, whose

novel was written in the immediate aftermath of the famine, was more concerned with

depicting the extreme tragic situations that hunger gave birth to, the cries for food and

the deaths on the streets of Calcutta, and with analysing the situation, than with

engaging discursively with the state of hunger. The latter could only be done from a

relative distance when the immediate tragedy was over. Indeed, Bhattacharya’s He

Who Rides a Tiger, which was published in the same year as Nectar, has sections

where Kalo speculates on the relations between hunger, law, and caste.226 Markandaya

through this depiction seems to not only speak of hunger and its everyday nature in

Indian villages, but also comment on the links between production systems, economic

and social stratification, and the inevitability of the situation. Post-independence India

saw huge investments in heavy industrialisation by the state, in the concepts of

progress and modernisation of the villages. Markandaya, by setting the novel in a late-

colonial period and by publishing it in the immediate postcolonial times, admonished

the terrible socio-economic future awaiting the villagers. If the postcolonial period

226 For instance, when Kalo is arrested for looking ‘suspiciously’ at the modern luxury buildings in

Calcutta, is taken to the magistrate, and pleads his innocence, the magistrate asks: ‘Why did you have

to live?’. Kalo is shocked and can only answer, ‘I’m a worm, sir, it is nothing that I live or die’. He is

shocked because he had a different and a favourable notion of colonial law in his village. During the

famine times, space, caste and administrative/legal judgements appear linked. See, Bhattacharya, Tiger,

p. 36.

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was beset with hunger, food crises, and starvation, state policies only worsened the

conditions by not taking care of the hierarchised nature of agriculture in India, by

ignoring a large mass of landless agriculturalists, and by shifting the focus onto heavy

industrialisation which further stripped the agriculturalists of their jobs. These

perceptions and social commentaries are sharply rendered through the use of a

personalised, fast-skipping, memoir style of narration, which allows discourses of an

intimate and strategic engagement with body and its adjustments to hunger, in order

to indicate the irony and pathos of the situation.

In the essay ‘Socio-literature’, Markandaya writes that two centuries of

colonialism, imperialism, and racism have shaken to the core the values of mutual love

and peaceful co-existence. Indian literature at the crucial postcolonial juncture does

not have the luxury to avoid these issues of historical subjection. She emphasised the

need to write a ‘socio-literature’ or the ‘literature of concern’, which is not

propaganda/didacticism but ‘a representation of what is like to be there and feel it

happening to you’.227 I think novel-writing or artistic activity in general points to this

social turn in the immediate aftermath of independence. There is a dominant tendency

in writers/artists to use a mode that situates a personalised tragic narrative to historicise

the conditions of scarcity and starvation in the postcolonial aftermath. Through this

mode they tell us how literature of this period mirrors and documents a disillusioned

social reality in a tremendously self-conscious, critical, and suggestive manner. As we

now move to the final section of the chapter and take up a Bengali novel published in

1982, we see that many of these indications and realisations on manufactured hunger

and starvation remain relevant even thirty-five years after independence. What is

however striking about this novel is that in order to revisit the 1943 Bengal famine,

the novelist uses a metafictional mode – a film being made on the famine within the

narrative – and various technical innovations to imply that though the famine is over,

the conditions of starvation and malnutrition continue to ravage the rural society in

Bengal and around.

227 Markandaya qtd in Joseph, Kamala, p. 216.

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Amalendu Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne: Metafictional Mode of a

Post-Disaster Postcolonial Society

At the end of Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel, So Many Hungers!, Rahoul contemplates

the deep and wide effects that the famine will have for the people in postcolonial rural

Bengal: ‘a physically shattered race’ and a deep ‘inner degradation’.228 Rahoul’s

worries will not be entirely correct, yet Amalendu Chakrabarty’s (1934-2009)229 work,

Ākāler Sandhāne (1982; In Search of Famine)230 presents a social picture of the

postcolonial rural Bengal which is not very different either. The novel is about a film

crew from Calcutta visiting the village of Hatui, located in the small-town of

Mohanpur, to make a film based on the 1943 famine. The famine is said to have had

brutal effects on this part of the world which is ‘visible’ in the villagers’ emaciated

bodies, their chronic starvation, and malnutrition problems. As in Bhattacharya’s

work, this novel is also about shuttling between the urban and rural areas: the urban

comes to the rural and through the film script redeploys the famine there, pushing the

villagers to confront their tragic past and to evaluate their current condition of being.

This is done through the use of irony and the metafictional mode of the famine script

within the main narrative of filming the famine. There are further stylistic importations

from film and theatre, given the fact that the novel was written after a film script by

Chakraborty for Mrinal Sen’s acclaimed production of the same name (1980).231 The

narrative is improvised on many levels, marking a set of ruptures, mutations, and

228 Bhattacharya, Hungers, p. 189. 229 Amalendu Chakraborty was born in undivided Bengal and was brought to Calcutta in the early

1940s. In his teens, he was witness to the traumatic chapters of famine, riots, and war, and to the

resistance movements by leftist organisations. As member of the Communist Party of India, he worked

on many fronts, mainly in the capacity of a social worker. His novels, the majority of which are set in

urban premises, aim to bring out the political and economic tensions in the rural world in post-

independence India, through different narrative techniques such as interior monologue, stream-of-

consciousness, or broken stories. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s premier literary

award, for his novel Jabajjibon (Entire Life) in 1986. He wrote numerous short stories, plays, letters,

and memoirs. Unfortunately, nothing has been translated into English as of now. What is also sad is the

minimal availability of secondary literature on him. For someone versed in Bangla, YouTube holds a

number of video interviews by and on him. 230 Amalendu Chakraborty, Ākāler Sandhāne (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2010). 231 Amalendu’s first draft, written in the late 1970’s, was made into the film in 1980, and was

reconstructed and translated into English (with the name In Search of Famine) by Samik

Bandyopadhyay in 1983. The novel version was published in 1982, and remains untranslated in English

as yet. My study is based on this novel, and all translations are mine. When possible, I have consulted

with the reconstructed text.

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differences, which, I argue, compellingly correspond to the historical tensions of

posterity in postcolonial society and culture.

The novel begins as Paramesh Mitra, a critically acclaimed film director who

has come to Mohanpur to direct a film on the famine, is seen to search for an old lady

known as Shetolaburi. He saw her first when he came here to select the location – ‘a

skeleton of a human whose skin has shrunk and withered, and who walks with a

hunchback, draping an old, dirty, and patchy handmade towel over her waist’.232

Paramesh wants her in the film which would begin with a shot where this old lady is

seen sitting at an old temple under an old tree, in a village that has seen several

droughts, floods, and levels of torture from the feudal system.233 But throughout the

month-long production of the film, Shetolaburi is never found. She is reported to be

seen here and there, but never caught on camera. In her continued absence,

Chakraborty seems to make the suggestion that there is discrepancy between

Paramesh’s cinematic expectation and the contemporary social reality. Sympathetic to

Left politics but sceptical of the ideology of the leftist Communist Party of India

(Marxist),234 Paramesh is aware of the reasons responsible for the famine –

imperialism, war, and corruption. But his reasons based on archival research and

secondary literature available on the famine, and his lack of awareness of the everyday

life and living in the rural parts of postcolonial Bengal, arrange for a different, if not

false, conception of reality. He believes that the historical conditions of the famine can

only be properly shown to people if the film is situated in a famine-stricken village.

But, at the same time, he is apprehensive of employing village artists in his work, as

they lack professional skills in acting. Film for him is not only art but also an industry,

a commitment to a huge amount of money, material, and people. It is a ‘trade’.235

232 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 23. 233 Ibid, p. 24. 234 The novel was published in 1982 when the ruling political party in Bengal, the Communist Party of

India (Marxist), following strictly the Soviet line of governance, was greatly inclined towards putting

the Party directives before art and artistic freedom. There had been long-term ideological problems on

politics and aesthetics between the CPI and the CPI (M), and later between these two parties and the

CPI (Marxist-Leninist). For an understanding of party-line politics and its debates with committed art

and aesthetics in 1970s Bengal, see, variously, Partha Chatterjee, The Present History of West Bengal:

Essays in Political Criticism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Praful Bidwai, The Phoenix

Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian Left (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2015); Ranabir

Samaddar, ‘Eternal Bengal’, in Being Bengali: At Home and in the World, ed. by Mridula Nath

Chakraborty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 181-201; and Shoma A. Chatterji, Filming Reality: The

Independent Documentary Movement in India (New Delhi: Sage, 2015). 235 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 116, p. 215.

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Through these contradictions, the novel compels an abiding focus on the question of

reality. What is real in realist representation? How is realist representation exploited

for commercial success in films? These questions are given an insightful response in

a scene when, after a debate on the inadequate representation of the famine in literary

and artistic works with Kiranmoy Bhattacharya, a veteran member of the Indian

People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and current actor for the film, a distraught

Paramesh looks at his shadow in the school compound of their lodging:

The unstable and swinging lamp on his back has turned his already extended

shadow into a wide and unreal form until it is lost in the deep darkness of the

night. The broken light on the right-side of the humanities building of the

school has created a tattered composition of light and dark and extended his

shadowy self so much further that the reflection of his head now looks like that

of a gigantic monster. If reflection is so false, can celluloid be true? Whatever

it is, he has to speak the truth. The truth of art.236

The author presents here important questions about social reality, art, and truthful

representation through the dichotomy of light and darkness. Seen from different angles

or with different proportions of light, the same shape can create different forms and

meanings. How does one then get to the ‘truth’ through realist representation? How

are truth and reality connected philosophically and materially? Is Paramesh’s

understanding of reality and truth filtered through his research-based knowledge and

his preconceived assumptions of the famine and of the rural people in Bengal?

Through the use of free indirect discourse, Chakraborty’s narrator enters Paramesh’s

mind and expresses his doubts over the truth value held by the representational arts

such as film or literature. At the same time, there is a clear implication that Paramesh

suffers from the anxiety of ‘showcasing’ truth through art. These elements of doubt

and anxiety are configured and accelerated through his various debates on famine and

cultural representation with the actor Kiranmoy. A long-time theatre activist,

Kiranmoy was involved with the IPTA in the 1940s and became gradually

disillusioned with the failure of the IPTA in making theatre a weapon for the masses

in post-independence Bengal.237 For him, reality is not about finding the correct place

236 Ibid, p. 183. I am emphasising words in the narrative that are originally written in English. 237 Kiranmoy’s character is probably modelled on the notable dramatist, Bijan Bhattacharya, given the

close match between the two. Bhattacharya’s highly successful works on the famine, such as Nabanna,

were part of the IPTA and provided future disillusionments on the failed prospects of the organisation,

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or a skillful set of actors, but rather about making it communicable to the people whose

stories are being staged. He believes in the potential in Paramesh’s script, but also

criticises in cynical and sometimes abrasive language – an essential hypocrisy within

this sort of project which mainly caters to an urban educated class, minting money on

the lost causes of the people:

We have turned ourselves into self-nominated guardians of the people through

our films and theatre, our art and culture, and our politics. We are totally fine

with this act and comfortably cocooned in our delusional cages. We live in a

circle. And, look at these poor people like Haren here? They live in a society.

They are weavers. They know who they are weaving for. They have to know

their market because of the nature of their job.238

The hypocrisy of authoritatively speaking the truth for the poor and the vulnerable,

Kiranmoy adds, is part of the urban art culture, which tends to capture human

conditions of the world within the narrow geographic walls of Calcutta: from the

famine in Bengal to the struggles in Vietnam, Rhodesia, or Cuba, everything within a

single frame and walled space.239 Countering Paramesh’s ‘pathological interest’ in

knowledge gathered from the archives and in the conviction that posterity allows a

better viewpoint for the famine, he asks why films and performance-based art in post-

independence India have been largely silent about the Bengal famine, ‘that boundless

insanity of imperialism that destroyed five million people in Bengal’, why they have

not contributed to making strong peasant consciousness or rather any large-scale food

movements as such.240 For him, this is inseparably related with the current political

ideology, where the postcolonial state arranges for building a dam, the Damodar

Valley Corporation, to prevent flood, and then uses it to cause flood at whim so that

welfare is understood as a progressive and indispensable ideology for nation-building

and national development.241 In the same way that the centralised urban-based welfare

state controls the occurrence and possibility of disasters at the rural frontiers through

as mentioned in his lecture on the 25th anniversary of Nabanna. See Bijan Bhattacharya, Nabanna,

1983. 238 Chakrabarty, Ākāler, p. 138. I am emphasising the word originally spoken in English. 239 Ibid, p. 138; though he is part of the Calcutta ‘Group Theatre’, he regards the political ideology of

internationalism as baseless, and is against the lack or misrepresentation of domestic or national issues

plaguing our everyday life or the life of the peasants, the workers, the tribals and the downtrodden. For

a reading of the Calcutta ‘Group Theatre’, see Bharucha, Rehearsals. 240 Ibid, p. 182. 241 Ibid, p. 21.

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its modernising principles, the urban project of film-making ‘deploys’ the famine in

the rural with a cynical distance. There is no meaningful engagement by urban writers

and artists with the social reality at the rural frontiers. Thus, later, when Paramesh

speaks of the difficulty of realist representation (‘can you imagine, you come out of

fantasy straight to an unfamiliar land with some unknown faces on your shoulders,

and you are confronted with that crude reality’), Kiranmoy retorts: ‘who is unknown

to you? What is fantasy? Which one is reality?’242 This criticism corroborates

Kiranmoy’s lampooning of the present urban culture as ideologically too narrow or

vague and of the urban artists as ‘the beautiful gods of metropolitan elitism’.243 While

Paramesh explains why he is convinced that a rural folk theatre artist cannot represent

reality well enough, Kiranmoy’s jagged response goes, ‘the real becomes unreal to

you when you extend your hands to it?’244 In these methodological and ideological

debates between Paramesh and Kiranmoy, Chakraborty gives us insight into the

problems plaguing the postcolonial rural society, and especially into the uncommitted

and unmindful discourses of representation by the urban artists and intellectuals.

Unlike the IPTA which went to villages and conveyed the truth of the famine to the

villagers in an act of organising them for political resistance, films are there mainly to

make money, by exploiting the sincere emotions of suffering and tragedy. As one of

the crew says later, the crew’s job is not to fight amongst themselves but to finish the

film and to send it for consideration at international awards. Chakraborty indicates

through these questions that the debate here is not only about postcolonial economy

and politics, but also where different art forms fit within the field of culture – captured

here in the tussle between cinema and theatre – and how the spheres of politics,

economy, and aesthetics are connected. As we continue to barter assumptions and

stereotypes, and project a preferred ideological version of reality, truth continues to

elude us – a truth that requires sincere, empathetic, and critical engagement with the

everyday social reality in postcolonial Bengal. Like the ironic image in the above

quote of Paramesh’s gigantically growing shadow ‘lost in the deep darkness of the

night’, his art also looks unsubstantial and vague.

242 Ibid, p. 246. 243 Ibid, p. 21, p. 233. 244 Ibid, p. 214.

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This dichotomy of truth and art is historicised through the uneven and tragic

material conditions of the postcolonial rural society. In their first walk-around in

Mohanpur, the venue for filming, the crew discovers the rising urban mode of living

in this remote part of the state of West Bengal: street lights, shops on either sides of

the street, two-storey houses, king-size cigarettes, and so on. In this moment of

excitement and melancholy, characteristic of the flâneur, the main actress Nandita

points at the existence of television antennae and wonders whether this place can at

all represent the periodic reality they want to capture.245 Largely built around jotedars

(large landholders), rich peasants, and a petty-bourgeois class of teachers, doctors, and

political party workers, Mohanpur appears to be a bhadralok neighbourhood. A little

later they come to Hatui, the main setting for the famine, and find it to be a small

village of lower-caste landless labourers darkened by ‘a shroud as the new moon hangs

over it’.246 Against the rise of urbanisation in Mohanpur, Hatui has houses like ‘broken

toys’ where people ‘survive, only survive’,247 and rush to the town in surplus numbers

for the state’s decree of ‘Food for Work’.248 This highly uneven development is not

an anomaly but an integral feature of postcolonial rural India. Speaking of the patterns

of urbanisation and settlement in West Bengal, economist Biplab Dasgupta (1987)

points out the steady decline in agriculture in parts of postcolonial rural Bengal. The

colonial government established the system of Permanent Settlement, but maintained

no systematic recovery from calamities such as famine and flood. Postcolonial

urbanisation has been equally indifferent to the need to modernise the agricultural

system.249 The rise in demand for jute and cotton as raw materials for urban or foreign

markets, the crowdedness of villages, and the migration to major cities for factory

work or to rural areas for commercial crop production have been further detrimental

to an organic economic development of rural society.250 This has eliminated the

possibility for food production. Marcus Franda notes how the shift from food crops to

cash crops and a strong racket of black-marketing gradually created a huge food crisis

in 1960’s Bengal. In his speeches, Franda records, the then Chief Minister P. C. Sen

spoke of his inability to ‘demystify’ the ‘sabotage’, but he was convinced that ‘an

245 Ibid, p. 110. 246 Ibid, p. 18. 247 Ibid, p. 19. 248 Ibid, p. 140. 249 Biplab Dasgupta, ‘Urbanization and Rural Change in West Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly,

22.8 (1987), 337-44 (p. 337). 250 Ibid, pp. 338-39.

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unholy combination of a section of jotedars (large landholders) and rice mill owners’

were attempting ‘to hoard food now, in the expectations of a greater profit later on’.251

This not only echoes the long history of deindustrialisation, uneven commercialisation

of agriculture, and the birth of numerous famines and ‘natural’ disasters in the

nineteenth century (echoing Sumit Sarkar’s findings mentioned in the previous

chapter),252 but also suggests more closely the social conditions behind the Bengal

famine, especially the rise of black market, corrupt traders, and hoarders like Girish in

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel. The structural entrenchment of colonial land policy

and speculative mode of capitalism is so deep that, despite elaborate rationing and

redistribution schemes, Franda notes, the Congress government in power could hardly

weather the crisis.253

This crisis manifests, Chakraborty suggests insightfully here, the spatialisation

of caste structures in rural Bengal. Mohanpur is urbanised and aspiringly bhadralok,

whereas Hatui remains stuck within its lower-caste stigma and harsh poverty. The

people of Hatui, we are told, have always worked for the babus (the gentry) and the

kartas (the landlords) as sharecroppers and landless labourers. Following Amartya

Sen’s thesis of entitlement failure, where Sen explains how the collapse of distribution

and exchange systems during the Second World War deprived the dependent section

of the producers (artisans, sharecroppers, landless farmers, and craftsmen) of their

entitlement to buy food,254 the villagers, mainly from the lower castes, appeared to

have faced the famine in its most brutal form. Not much, however, has changed in this

social and spatial distributions of violence. There are episodes in the novel where the

rural destitute are seen to pick up wheat from the road after a wheat-truck passes by.

During the end of the film production, when Paramesh needs a number of people for

a scene that captures the migration of the famine-ravaged rural population to Calcutta,

the village’s youth bring trainloads of emaciated, skeletal people within a short time

because these people have been promised a day’s food in return.255 The famine may

be over in symbolic terms, but, as Rob Nixon tells us, it has now transformed into

malnutrition, deprivation, and slow violence.256 The postcolonial political economy

251 Marcus Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 137-38. 252 Sarkar, Modern India, p. 26. 253 Franda, Radical Politics, p. 138. 254 Sen, Poverty, p. 77. 255 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 231. 256 Nixon, Slow Violence, p. 2.

77

has not only widened the economic divide between the urban and the rural, it has

furthered the problematic relation of class and caste through the logic of scattered

urbanisation. Thus, Mohanpur, a neighbourhood with many landowning peasants, has

received all the benefits of the Five Year Planning (a post-independence, Nehruvian,

Soviet-influenced vision of development through building heavy industries and social

welfare), while Hatui, a village of lower-caste, lower-class people, whose wellbeing

was supposed to be monitored by the Mohanpur electoral representatives, receives

nothing save the disgust of the higher classes and the unwritten injunction that the

Hatui people have to work day in and day out to earn a day’s meal. Chakraborty writes

with mordant irony here: ‘they [the people of Hatui] have learnt much from their

ancestors – this is the rule. They should not go near the babus or peek in through their

windows. Their dark and filthy shadows are said to remain stuck on the glasses like

still photos. Then, the glasses become untouchable’.257 There is hardly any change in

caste and class relations since independence; there is still no constructive effort at

realising the welfare state schemes of socio-economic development for the poorer

section of society. The famine is officially over, but for the impoverished it has now

turned into an everyday condition of being, a state of malnutrition and constant

starvation. The response from Poran Porel, a disabled Hatui villager, to Paramesh’s

film project is poignant here: ‘see, the babus have come from the city to search for the

1940’s famine. 12 rupees a maund of rice. That famine […] There is no famine now?

[…] Babu, we have the famine in our bodies. We have seen famines from birth’.258

The famine is not an isolated social and economic condition but a concrete embodied

aspect, quotidian in nature and accumulated in form.

The historical transition from famine to chronic malnutrition, however, is not

one of uninterrupted continuity. If the narrative wants to situate the famine of the

1940s in a famine-ravaged village, it has to also take into account the structural and

socio-historical changes that have taken place over the years. This is where the

metafictional mode becomes important. After the first thirty-two pages, there is a

blank page followed by a page recording the details of the film (much like dramatis

personae in a play), and then the script begins:

257 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 122. 258 Ibid, p. 169.

78

Undivided Bengal. January 1943.

A flock of white ducks flying in the bright cloudless sky.

Endless horizons of ripe paddy in the field. Peasants, male and female, and in

groups, can be seen working in the field. The cheery winter afternoon in the

month of harvest.

All of a sudden, there is a blistering sound in the sky, from somewhere higher

than the clouds. […]

Chandradhar and Arjun in close-ups now. They have arisen from their field

work, puzzled, and looking up in the sky. 259

This is a story of Chandradhar and his family, his son Arjun, and daughter-in-law

Savitri in an unnamed village. The narrative begins with the Japanese airplanes, and

slowly moves to giving an account of the political factors responsible for the famine:

the unabashed and forcible raids of paddy fields by the landlords in the name of war,

the abandoning by the land-owning classes of the dependent landless labourers, the

relentless torture of the peasants to sell their remaining land, the arrival of the babus

or townsfolk in the villages after the bombings in Calcutta, and the grave suffering

and emigration of the rural folk as destitute to the city – reasons that we have already

encountered in Bhattacharya’s novel. Chakraborty’s decision to use the film script

within the narrative was not accidental. He knew Mrinal Sen and requested him to do

Ākāler Sandhāne after watching Truffaut’s film-within-a-film narrative in Day for

Night (1973).260 The metafictional mode, which has a longer history in literature, was

powerfully revived by a number of writers from the Third World in the 1970s to posit

the shifting political sensibilities of the age.261 Chakraborty employs a metafictional

mode to tell the story of the famine, which has a singular significance in the history of

Bengal and India, and to tell how it transitions into a deeper and broader social crisis

259 Ibid, p. 35. 260 See Siladitya Sen’s interview with Mrinal Sen on Chakraborty’s work, ‘Mrinal Sen on Amalendu

Chakraborty’, YouTube (May 12, 2013) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAgY98Iia30>

[accessed Mar 25, 2017]. 261 On this, see the works of Jorge Louis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, in Labyrinths:

Selected Stories and Writings, eds. by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions,

2007), pp. 88-95; Alejo Carpentier, Kingdom in This World (New York: Knopf, 1957); Gabriel García

Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper and Row,

1970); Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1981); Margaret Atwood, The

Handmaid’s Tale (London: Cape, 1986); Akhtarujjuman Iliyas, Chilekothar Sepai (Dhaka: Dhaka

University Press, 1986); and Mo Yan, Red Sorghum, trans. by Howard Goldblatt (London: Heinemann,

1993).

79

of wider forms of deprivation and malnutrition. This mode allows him not only to

clearly situate the main historical causes of the famine (imperialism, war, capitalism,

and even the Quit Indian agitations uncovered in Paramesh’s research – which is

admirable given the fact that the script was written in the early 1970s when studies on

the Bengal famine had just begun to attract international attention), but also, and

crucially so, to focus on the shifting typology of the (middle) classes in contemporary

postcolonial rural societies. Paramesh finds in the rich peasants of Mohanpur,

Sudhanyo Kundu, Nidhi Dewan or Manik Chatujje, and others, the greedy and

immoral characters of Kelo Samanta, Kedar Kongar, and Tarini Mukujje of the famine

script. He comes to know via Sukumar that Sudhanyo and Nidhi are angry because the

film crew has not rented their house or bought everyday commodities from them, and

concludes that these feudalist characters have remained the same. Paramesh is not

altogether incorrect here. As we have noticed in the links between the late-colonial

famine and postcolonial starvation, the famine plot does have striking resemblance

with the rest of the story set in the current time. Indeed, the babus who came to the

village during the famine brought with them the culture of drinking and prostitution.

The film crew was accused of drinking in the school premises and forcing poor women

into prostitution. However, despite these similarities and transitions in society, class,

and culture, Paramesh fails to observe an essential dissimilarity in the economic and

cultural patterns among this current class of village heads: like the urban Paramesh,

these people, too, are (and aspire to be) bhadralok, which is a colonial social category

of native urban upper-caste middle-class people who were educated in English and

who imitated western culture and modernity to earn respect from the British.262 In the

postcolonial aftermath, modernisation and urbanisation projects of the postcolonial

welfare state, the betterment in transportation means, and the FYP schemes,

contributed not only to a wide socio-economic development, but also to the

262 For S. N. Mukherjee, bhadralok is a category of both caste and class inscriptions: caste since it was

built upon the large participation of non-brahminical castes into political organisation and into the acts

of scriptural interpretations, bolstered mainly by the rational mode of thinking and of the multi-caste

composition of the New Bengal movement; and class because it was a group of suddenly rising, rich,

educated natives benefiting from their service to the Empire and imitative of the colonial lifestyle and

economic privileges. See, S. N. Mukherjee, ‘Class, Caste and Politics in India, 1815-38’, in Elites in

South Asia, ed. by S. N. Mukherjee and Edmund Leach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1970), pp. 33-78 (pp. 55-62). For a more nuanced and updated study, see Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘The

Curious Case of the Bhadralok: Class or Sentiment?’, in The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education,

and the Colonial Intellectuals in Bengal 1848-1885 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 35-

67.

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educational aspirations, the changing taste in cultural patterns and belief, and the

questions of social prestige in suburban and rural Bengal. In the very beginning of the

novel, for instance, Paramesh meets a boy from a rural hinterland who commutes

between his village and Calcutta for his job, wants to open a film society for his people,

and runs a radical little magazine from Chakdah, the suburb of Calcutta.263 As

Paramesh remains doubtful of the fuller use of such practices, he meets another boy

from Hatui who has just completed his Master of Commerce degree and is now

pursuing a job in Calcutta.264 The world is slowly changing, and higher education and

good transportation means – the boons of modernisation – are shaping the aspirations

of the post-independence rural societies towards modernity and bhadralok

respectability. These aspirations, however, do not altogether discard or exclude the

ritualistic practices deeply ingrained within the rural and suburban cultures. Rituals,

old habits, religious and customary practices adapt to, and remain coeval with, modern

tastes and culture.265 In a crucial episode, Paramesh goes to Manik Chatterjee’s house

after the latter’s repeated invitation and finds the house to be a big, two-storey building

decorated and designed in the manner of the latest urban style. He notices that the

room has photographs of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna and Mother Sarada, who

are variously understood as saints in Bengal and are both the harbingers of modernity

and the preservers of ritualistic Hindu Indianness. Manik claims that he has always

encouraged his daughter to join the theatre and performing arts, but after realising that

Paramesh is searching for a woman who has to act a prostitute, he abuses Paramesh

and throws him out of his house: ‘Keep your long lectures with you. First, you’re

making a rowdy film and forcing the whole village into a bad culture of drinking, crass

and debauchery. And now you’re looking for girls from bhaddor respectable houses

to play the roles of whores. Why, what is wrong with our daughters? What have they

done? Won’t they have to get married? Don’t they have respect?’266 These questions

clearly suggest if modernity in postcolonial (rural) Bengal means economic

development, urbanisation, and the emergence of a bhadralok class, it also means the

rooted co-existence with old rituals and customs and beliefs in gender and social roles.

A woman in an Indian village can acquire modernity through English education and

263 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 6. 264 Ibid, p. 87. 265 For a study on how traditions adapt to modernity, see Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Modernity and Politics in

India’, pp. 137-62 (pp. 156-57). 266 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 242.

81

western cultural practices, but she still has to work within the strict perimeters set by

the patriarchal society. If Nandita, a Calcutta-born woman, can teach in a college and

act the role of Savitri, the one raped in the film, or later Shipra Chakraborty, a gazetted

officer’s wife, can play Zennat Begam (another victim of rape and prostitution), Manik

Chatterjee’s daughter cannot because art is not entirely separate from the practices of

social reality in the rural world. New artistic and cultural practices arise from the

changing consequences of political economy. Kiranmoy, through whom Chakraborty

builds this point, reminds Paramesh of this crucial dissimilarity between the rural

heads in his film script, who were averse to and suspicious of urban culture and style

of living, and the ones in the current times who have embraced urbanity but not

without discarding the traditional rural customs and beliefs.267 Kiranmoy reproaches

Paramesh, for the latter has not been able to grasp the ‘typology’ in rural society:

‘People don’t stay in the same form and manner for thirty-seven years. They are

different people from the dimension of typology […] that girl, who is severely scolded

by her mother and aunts for not combing her hair in the evening, or by her father and

uncles for cutting her nails on a Thursday, cannot be the same girl who can play the

role of Malati [the whore]’.268 Things have changed; the mode of governance (the

welfare state) and social practices (postcolonial urbanity) have adapted to the new

demands. There is no large-scale famine anywhere. But there are innumerable hidden

faces of malnutrition and poverty. This metafictional mode is used to suggest the

transformation into the postcolonial slow violence of the colonially-produced famine.

Chakraborty makes the important point that, amidst this, there is also a rise of

respectability within the middle classes, and the pursuit of urbanity and urban culture

in rural areas – which defines itself against the uncouthness and rusticity of the lower

castes and classes – imitates the metropolitan, and yet distinguishes itself as something

purely and ritualistically Indian.

Since the metafiction mode is made to create the simulation of a famine

breeding famine-like conditions of long starvation and malnutrition, Chakraborty

267 I would like to mention here that this reading of modernity, which encompasses aspects of

modernisation and cultural elements combining native rituals and customs, is not specifically a rural

feature, but it is the character of modernity per se, or more specifically, of postcolonial modernity. In

the third chapter, I will show how these combined aspects appear clearly in the urban spheres through

reading the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya. This is exactly why realism, born out of the consciousness

of modernity, in its postcolonial avatar at least, is extremely experimental, subversive, and

accommodative. 268 Ibid, pp. 246-47.

82

projects the famine story into a separate script – a blank page separating the narration

of the current story from the seventy-odd pages which is an uninterrupted film script

of the 1943 Bengal famine. Interestingly, this famine script has no closure, but ends

with Savitri’s character turning gradually into multiple women figures of socio-

economic victimisation and of reconstructed agency in postcolonial Bengal, appearing

variously in the 1959 food crisis, in the 1964 worker’s strike, in the 1967 peasant

uprisings, and finally in the character of a very old lady (Shetolaburi) whose wrinkled-

face suggests endurance through the cracks and fissures of modernity. The ending of

this script is marked by narrative ruptures. Often, the sequential third-person narrative

is punctured with newspaper reports:

THE FAMINE WAS AN ACT OF GOD

L. S. Amery, Secretary of State for India

Amrita Bazar Patrika – Tuesday December 14, 1943

[…]

In a heated rally, respected Viceroy of India, Leopold Stenet Amery, speaking

about India, and mainly about Bengal, has stated that the famine is an act of

god. The British government is doing whatever it can – endless numbers of

friend ambulance units have been working day and night and taking proper

care of the victims, and free gruel is being served to approximately fifteen

million people every day.269

Reminiscent of the technique of ‘Newsreels’ used by Dos Passos in the USA trilogy

(1930-36),270 reports about the horrible social conditions during the famine fill the

pages, one after another. The report is juxtaposed with the sufferings of Chandradhar’s

family. The journalistic account above, for instance, is followed by the third person

narrator: ‘So, if the famine is an act of god, holding our tiny and remotely located

landlord Sri Kalidhan Samanta responsible for the plight of the peasants should not be

right. That he could not lend Chandradhar anything more than half a sack of rice for

the latter’s entire farming land is because he and his family are also victims of this

269 Ibid, p. 97. 270 The whole trilogy is full of the techniques of ‘camera eye’ and ‘newsreels’ which are juxtaposed

with the perspectives of the characters. See Dos Passos, U. S. A.: The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen-Nineteen,

The Big Money. (London: John Lehman, 1950).

83

God-created, divine, and bizarre famine.’271 Hardly can we miss the biting sarcasm

here against colonialism and against the native landed elite. Note also how the

global/macro-historical aspects are shown to affect the local/micro-historical lives of

the remotely located peasants and landlords. The narration moves fast, and the script

ends as Chandradhar’s family members are all dead from hunger and from the

exploitation of the landlord and money lenders, and Savitri is seen to have joined the

destitute in Calcutta, withered, starved, and sexually abused. Through these

journalistic inclusions, Chakraborty situates the catastrophic nature of the famine and

marks a rupture with the ongoing narrative, which through the interplay of first- and

third-person perspectives and various fictional strategies of realist narrative make us

forget about the other narrative, i.e. the narrative of the contemporary time of

Paramesh and his film-making. This is an important narrative strategy. The ruptured

narration and the incomplete closure indicate that the social conditions in these two

different times are actually deeply connected, but at the same time lack straightforward

transitions from one to the other. The way Paramesh perceives Savitri’s character to

be jumping from one agentic character in a social movement to another is politically

naïve and idealistic. This is not what Chakraborty understood rural society to be in his

long life as social worker in the rural frontiers for the Communist Party of India

(Marxist). He shows the connection between these two conditions through the

theatrical properties of the interruptive narrative voices of two Hatui villagers. In

pseudo-monologic asides (I call them thus because, like asides, they are very much

part of the main action of the narrative but not entirely monologic as they are narrated

by the omniscient narrator of the current-time narrative), Chakraborty gives brief life-

histories of Poran Porel and his wife Durga, who are victims of caste and gender

exploitation by the babus. Poran wanted to escape class and caste stigma by working

at an urban factory. But he loses his right hand in a train accident and comes back to

the village as a disabled person, unable to continue even his caste-bound job as a

landless (bonded) labourer, and has to depend on his wife’s earning. Durga agrees to

play the role of Malati (the whore) against her husband’s wishes because the role

would provide food and milk for her severely undernourished and dying child. But she

fails to do the shot because her memories with the class of people about to rape her

are too sharp and private to disclose to the public (she was actually raped for asking

271 Ibid, p. 97.

84

for food for her baby), and because, in the rural world, social reality and art are not

separate. The film that projects reality in the village attempts to find contemporary

value and meaning in Hatui and is thus too real to be made there. The rural world still

has not recovered from the tragedy of centuries of exploitation, droughts, famines, and

malnutrition, to understand the critical distance required for a film production. As

Durga hides her face crying while a crowd gathers around in anger, Paramesh has to

‘pack up’ after this shot and leave. But the novel does not end here, the narrator says:

‘But Mohanpur remains there, even after all this. Life flows in Hatui’.272 Durga’s child

dies, but Poran does not beat her this time. They leave for the city for the final time to

find work and start again. Meanwhile, Shetolaburi is seen to forage for food. The final

lines of the novel are evocative:

After ages of epidemics, famines, and floods, until from the sin or from the

tiredness of living long in this withered body her hunchback does not turn her

back in a right angle with her waist, until her unevenly shaking head comes

stooping down and her forehead widens into the earth and gets muddled, the

old, very old Shetolaburi would continue to peck at the grains and forage for

food holding a broken and dry sprig.273

The irony is that the film crew never manages to find her but believes that she is dead,

while Shetolaburi is very much alive, fighting death with the age-old reality of

searching for food and surviving (recall what Chakraborty’s narrator told of the Hatui

people in the beginning: they ‘survive, only survive’). Paramesh wants her to be the

future of the character Savitri in the film who is to be raped and tortured but never

gives up, and participates in various resistant political movements based on food and

famine. In the film’s incompletion and the novel’s ending with Shetolaburi,

Chakraborty suggests that the filmic projection is determinate and sensational. The

utopian reality it wants to convey has no substance, because it is at a far remove from

the everyday world of malnutrition, suffering, and survival that postcolonial Bengal

constitutively stands for. History acts out in a continual (cyclical) manner, and not in

a transcendental fashion. Shetolaburi must have seen many such moments of harsh

reality, but she does not have to be the stereotypical victim of urban modes of

272 Ibid, p. 268. 273 Ibid, pp. 269-70.

85

oppression and perception. There are ruptures in history as there are continuities.

Shetolaburi’s absent presence is both a rupture and a continuity symbolically.

In summary, Chakraborty’s novel brings up a very important aspect of famine

and disaster: how disasters transition into a historical crisis. As Eric Cazdyn has noted,

disasters cannot be discussed without the phenomenon of crisis.274 Where Chakraborty

strikes with insight is the idea of ruptured historical continuity. He focuses on the

Bengal famine with distinct historicity, and presents how the great destruction of

economy, life, and community remains unresolved – how the society has to negotiate

the everyday present with the traumatic past. These two events are separate and yet

deeply interlinked. One just does not transition into the other easily and uncritically.

The constitutive differences (as in Kiranmoy’s typology) have to be pointed out as

much as the resemblances are to be highlighted. Since this disaster is closely followed

by the liberation from colonisation, the continuity needs to be further located in the

question of the postcolonial politics of the social welfare state. This is what

Chakraborty does through the narrative exploitation of irony, dichotomy, and

interruptive techniques, which variously consolidate the metafictional mode and

constitutively undermine a sequential linear mode of realist narrative, and yet indicate

realistically how, in the aftermath of disaster, postcolonial Bengal is ridden with the

crisis of malnutrition, starvation, and slow violence.

The capitalist tendencies of the welfare state tends to perpetuate these

conditions in a post-disaster postcolonial society. Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novel,

written and published in a decade crowded with and punctured by various kinds of

disasters, was meant to explore the historical reasons responsible for the famine for a

better postcolonial future. He uses an analytical-affective mode to find out links

between capitalism, colonialism, war, and disaster. Writing close to the event and

working as a journalist just before shifting to fiction-writing, he could not not

document the enormous nature of violence and crisis in contemporary life and society.

This ethnographic element compels him to adopt a melodramatic tone and a vernacular

bent of language, bringing through the acts the local and global nature of the disaster

into a dialectical framework. Both Chakraborty and Bhattacharya use the realist

framework of analysis and narration, but they also significantly complicate the form

274 Cazdyn, ‘Disaster’, p. 648.

86

through their dominant use of modes, the choice of which is shaped by the specificity

of the historical conjunctures that their writings address. I have argued that this brand

of realism is different from the social realist framework of the post-independence era

novels based generally on scarcity and starvation. To recall our discussions on how

disaster might shape literary form, these findings push me to consider whether we

would need a new interpretative category for disaster writing that carefully studies the

specific historical conjuncture, nature, and orientation of a disaster, and the global

forces responsible for its occurrence. A study of this kind may help us see how

disaster-based narratives are not aesthetically limited or technically weak, but are

historically conscious and politically energetic modes of expression.

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CHAPTER THREE

During and After the Naxalbari Movement: The Case of

Critical Irrealism

In Amalendu Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne (1982), the landless agriculturalist

Poran Porel offers the crucial insight that the famine of 1943 might be over but the

consequences are too starkly visible in the villagers’ emaciated bodies.275 Chakraborty

suggests through the metafictional mode that the slow violence of this chronic scarcity

is as devastating as the famine itself. These famine and starvation conditions gave birth

to several food movements in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, most notably in 1959 and in

1966, which were based on issues of sharecropping, bonded labour, price hike, black

marketing, starvation, as well as protest against the jotedar reign in the rural areas. As

the situation became worse, these movements and agitations turned into an organised

tribal-peasant uprising in Naxalbari in 1967. The uprising took dramatic turns in the

next five years, spreading like wildfire to other parts of the country, until being

severely crushed by the repressive machineries of the state. This chapter looks at the

socio-economic and political contexts of the movement and the conditions in its

aftermath through a reading of novels that register them.276 The violent and abrupt

nature of the movement, I argue, forces socially committed writers to develop different

modes of realist representation in order to grapple with the specific nature of political

crisis and to critique establishment politics. Mahasweta Devi uses a quest mode in

which she sets an apolitical person or a dedicated Communist Party member to find

out about their son or friend who was associated with the movement and killed or

disappeared by the State. Nabarun Bhattacharya, writing thirty years later and trying

to engage with the issue of exploitation of the urban poor by multinational capitalism,

repeatedly employs an urban fantastic mode that records how the legacy of Naxalism

(the methods and tactics of warfare and resistance) shapes the (imagined) everyday

life of the margins of contemporary urban society. Drawing on Michael Löwy’s work,

275 Chakraborty, Ākāler, p. 169. 276 I am using the term ‘Naxalbari’ to refer to the historic movement, and ‘Naxalite’ to address figures,

texts, aspects, etc. associated with this movement.

88

these modes are understood as constituting a ‘critical irrealist’ literary form. In reading

the form in the rural-postcolonial context rather than the European metropolitan

context that Löwy uses it in, the chapter complicates and expands the possibilities

within this framework.

The Naxalbari Movement, Representation, and Critical Irrealism

The Naxalbari movement began as an organised armed response to the jotedar

exploitation in the Naxalbari area of Bengal. Naxalbari is situated in the northern part

of West Bengal – an eastern state in India – at the foothills of the Himalayas, a

periphery of Kolkata. Comprising tribal people, most of whom are landless

agriculturalists, share-croppers, and tea plantation workers, the economy of these parts

is predominantly agricultural.277 It has long been controlled and overseen by the

jotedars. Born as an offshoot of the Permanent Settlement Act (1793), the jotedars

were the traditional caretakers of cultivable land (or jot), paying revenues to the

zamindars or landlords. Historians Ratna Ray and Rajat Ray note that the jotedars

‘owned sizeable portions of village lands and cultivated their broad acres with the help

of share croppers, tenants-at-will, and hired labourers’, and exploited the peasantry for

revenue.278 In the post-independence era, the jotedars, who had control over both a

277 Edward Duyker, Tribal Guerrillas: The Santals of West Bengal and the Naxalite Movement (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 4-5. 278 Ratna Ray and Rajat Ray, ‘Zamindar and Jotedars: A Study of Rural Politics in Bengal’, Modern

Asian Studies, 9.1 (1975), 81-102 (p.82). Debal SinghaRoy notes that the jotedar exploitation would

include the institutionalised means from ‘rack-renting, sub-infeudation, fragmentation of holdings,

indebtedness, increasing taxation, market manipulation’, to harsh physical punishment, raping of the

tribal-peasant women, bonded labour, and others. See, Debal K. SinghaRoy, Peasant Movements in

Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity (New Delhi: Sage, 2004), p. 54. Due to

their institutional power (their alliance with the mahajans, or money-lenders, and the police) and close

proximity with the land and everyday dealings in grain supplies, accounts, complaints, etc., the jotedars

soon became a strong and visible socio-economic presence in the rural areas, and by the implementation

of the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 (which clipped the powers of the zamindars, or landlords), had

already grown into the most powerful and richest agriculturalist class in Bengal. See Ray and Ray, p.

84, pp. 90-96. These shifts brought forth a structure of landed property relations where a few wealthy

zamindars remained at the top and numerous estates and tenures at the bottom, giving birth to a class

of ‘petty proprietors’ and intermediaries. Partha Chatterjee writes in Bengal 1920-1947: The Land

Question, (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 1984) that ‘The system of land tenure, combined with the

distinctiveness to the entry of domestic savings into native industrial enterprises and the destruction of

indigenous manufacturing, created the basic economic structure from which emerged this class of rent-

receivers, usurers and petty traders totally divorced from, and entirely uninterested in, the conditions of

social production. They lived entirely on “revenue”; only the distribution of the surplus concerned them,

they had no role in its creation’ (p. 13). This class, as Chatterjee further informs us, contributed to the

category of the middle-class, urban, educated ‘bhadralok’ who migrated to the urban centres and

became professionals ‘in law, journalists, medicine, teaching and civic and judiciary services’ based on

the rent surplus (p. 13). Despite lacking a direct relation to social production, this class came to rule the

sphere of cultural production and political power. We have already seen examples of this in Girish, the

89

large mass of land and labour and the legal and police power, came to rule agricultural

production. They were, as Marcus Franda notes, traditional supporters of the ruling

Indian Congress Party and its conservative policies on land tenure and

redistribution.279 In the Naxalbari area, the jotedar exploitation continued through the

‘ādhiar’ system of share-cropping, existent from the mid-nineteenth century, where

peasants were employed as contractual labourers and could be evicted at any time for

dispute over shares. In the 1960s, when the United Front Government led by the

Communist Party of India (Marxist) (hereafter CPI (M)) came to power, ‘the jotedars

and other reactionary elements began to spread the lie that the United Front

Government would rob small and medium owners of their land’.280 The landowners

started to get rid of the share-croppers fearing that the latter would ask for possession

of the land. The atmosphere was such that when, on May 22, 1967, a jotedar, defying

court orders, evicted a poor tenant from his land, a few tribal people occupied a tea

estate and fought with the armed guards the next day. This incident brought a posse of

policemen, and in the resultant fracas a police officer, Sonam Wangdi, died. The

following day, a bigger police force went to the area and shot nine tribal people,

mainly women and children, who were protesting in a demonstration.281 This event

infuriated the peasantry which was radicalised and organised for armed struggle by a

militant faction of the Left, led by Charu Mazumdar, the CPI (M) leader of the Siliguri

Division.

This was not an isolated event. There were a number of armed tribal-peasant

uprisings in late-/postcolonial India led by the Left organisations. Just before

independence, in the northern districts of Bengal, some peasants rose up against the

jotedars for a demand of two-thirds of the crop shares. This is known as the Tebhaga

Movement (1946-47).282 It was followed by the Telangana Uprising (1947) in Andhra

local trader, in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! and in the post-famine rise of the jotedars

into a respected bhadralok class in Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne. 279 Marcus Franda, Radical Politics, pp. 152-54. Though the Communist Party played a crucial role in

the abolition of landlordism in India, the jotedars continued to hold sway through electoral politics; on

this, see Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Decolonization in South Asia: The Meanings of Freedom in Post-

Independence West Bengal, 1947-1952 (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 108-09. 280 Hare Krishna Konar, the Minister for Land and Land Revenue, quoted in Sumanta Banerjee, India’s

Simmering Revolution: the Naxalite Uprising (London: Zed Books, 1984), p. 86. 281 Biplab Dasgupta, The Naxalite Movement (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1974), p. 3; Banerjee,

Simmering, p. 88. 282 The bargardars or share-croppers, who constituted the largest section of peasantry along with the

landless agriculturalists or bonded labourers, were also the most exploited by the jotedars. From the

mid-1920s, under the instruction of Communist Party of India, the All India Kishan Sabha started

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Pradesh, where the peasants launched an armed struggle against the Nizam for a better

share of crops.283 Both these movements were organised by the peasants’ and workers’

wings of the CPI.284 In the Naxalbari area, Sumanta Banerjee notes that the

Communists in North Bengal built up several peasant organisations between 1951 and

1954, radicalising the peasantry to fight the ‘petty oppressive acts of the jotedars’; and

then organised the tea-plantation workers and rallied them alongside the peasants

between 1955 and 1957.285 In the 1958-1962 period, the Naxalbari movement entered

a more militant phase under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar. Mazumdar, a forceful

orator and popular leader in the Siliguri subdivision of the Darjeeling district where

Naxalbari is located, influenced the local leadership and the tribal-peasant population

with his powerful reading of Indian state power – arguing that the Indian ruling class

was ‘semi-feudal and semi-colonial’ in nature, and that the ruling party, the Indian

Congress, had been captured by the local bourgeoisie as well as the imperialist powers

of the United States of America and the Soviet Union.286 Although agriculture was the

basis of the Indian economy, Mazumdar showed how Indian peasants, living a life of

starvation, hardship, and penury, were victims of multiple layers of structural

radicalising the agrarian workers. The two crop failures of 1938 and 1942 severely affected economic

conditions in the villages, and were then followed by the devastating famine of 1943-44 which killed

more than three million people, mostly peasants, and which led to the complete collapse of the existing

social and economic system in the villages. As the jotedars continued to be unsympathetic and exploit

the peasantry for revenue, the sharecroppers, in alliance with the small and middle peasantry, took up

arms, demanding two-thirds of the share rather than the age-old one-third. On this, see D. N. Dhanagare,

Peasants Movements in India, 1920-1950 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 360;

SinghaRoy, Peasant, pp. 56-57. 283 Like the raiyatbari system in Bengal which produced the class of jotedars, in Hyderabad the

jagirdari system had long been established. Over the years this system became highly hierarchised and

oppressive: deshmukhs and deshpandes (tax collectors) extorted various illegal taxes from the

peasantry, grabbed thousands of acres of land, and reduced many actual cultivators to the status of

landless agriculturalists (Dhanagare, p. 378). In a demonstration by the peasants organised by the

Communist Party in July 1946, the crowd became angry when ‘The goondas hired by the landlords

fired at the procession’ killing the village sangham leader. This marked the birth of the struggle. See

Dhanagare, Movements, p. 194; SinghaRoy, Peasant, pp. 73-74. This struggle went on for five years

until the Indian armed forces, in alliance with the Nizam, brutally crushed it in 1952. For an account,

see P. Sundarayya, Telangana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons (New Delhi: Foundation Books,

1972), pp. 40-128. In ‘Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried’ (1976), Ranajit Guha, as we noted

in Chapter One, registers the irony of the fact that bitter repression of peasant resistance to oppressive

class rule should have taken place in the context of India’s independence from colonial rule and the

establishment of formal democracy in the country. 284 There were also sporadic uprisings in Kakdwip and Sundarban in Bengal, in Bihar, Orissa, Kerala,

Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, under the instructions and leadership of the Communist Party. See, P.

Eashvaraiah, The Communist Parties in Power and Agrarian Reforms in India (New Delhi: Academic

Foundation, 1993), pp. 67-120. 285 Banerjee, p. 85. 286 Charu Mazumdar, ‘The Declaration of the All India Coordination Committee of Communist

Revolutionaries (AICCCR)’, in Charu Mazumdar Collected Works Vol 1, ed. by Basu Acharya

(Kolkata: Radical Impression, 2012), pp. 225-228.

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oppression, the most immediate being jotedar rule.287 Motivated by Maoist principles,

he spoke particularly of the revolutionary seizure of power and the ‘annihilation of the

class enemies’ (i.e. the jotedars and the mahajans or money-lenders): ‘The

annihilation of the class enemy does not only mean liquidating individuals, but also

means liquidating the political, social, and economic authority of the class enemy’.288

These readings not only influenced his fellow leftist intellectuals and the rural

population, but also proved to be hugely popular among the urban youth and members

of the working classes. As in the villages, there was sustained socio-economic

discontent in the urban centres. Post-independence Calcutta saw a teeming population

crisis. Because of the number of people who had come to live in the city as refugees

after the Partition of Bengal or simply in search of jobs, there was not adequate

housing available. A large number of people were living in slums, on railway

platforms or on the pavements.289 In addition to wide unemployment, there was an

industrial recession in 1966 due to the devaluation of currency. The resultant economic

crisis was escalated by the consequent inflation, giving birth to various agitations,

strikes, and movements (notably the food movements, tram-fare movements, and

others).290 The atmosphere of social and political turmoil was accompanied by the

contemporary student agitations against the education system. Students had lost faith

in an education system that failed to ensure jobs for them. There were rampant cases

of breaking chairs and tables within a university or a college, burning degree

certificates on convocations days, etc. In contrast to these social scenes of joblessness,

poverty, and squalor, there was a spectacular rise in jobs in the private and public

sectors for the well-connected and the upper-class families. Banerjee informs us that

despite the housing problems, the price of cement rose to very high levels in the 1960s

because of the demand for palatial residences, five-star hotels, garish cinema theatres

and nightclubs in the city.291 These palpable cases of socio-economic disparity gave

Charu Mazumdar’s theories of militant leftism wide popularity. When in early 1969

China transmitted its support for the Naxalbari uprising via Peking Radio and

287 Qtd. in Dasgupta, Naxalite, pp. 28-36. 288 Ibid, p. 40. 289 Ibid, p. 35. 290 Banerjee, pp. 32-35; for a more detailed account, see Food Movement of 1959: Documenting a

Turning Point in the History of West Bengal, ed. by Suranjan Das and Preamansukumar

Bandyopadhyay (Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi, 2004); and Sibaji Pratim Basu, ‘The Chronicle of a Forgotten

Movement: West Bengal – 1959 Revisited’, in India: Democracy and Violence, ed. by Samir Kumar

Das (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 213-44 (pp. 235-38). 291 Banerjee, p. 34.

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criticised the CPI (M) for its conservative and revisionist decisions, Mazumdar and

his allies, Kanu Sanyal, Parimal Majumdar, Sushital Roy Chowdhury, Saroj Datta,

and others, who had all long been in ideological dispute with the CPI (M), broke away

from it and set up another party, the CPI (Marxist-Leninist), with the aim of

representing the revolutionary activities ‘in practice’.292 This practice, Biplab

Dasgupta notes, started with the annihilation campaigns, the systematic killing of

jotedars and mahajans, and the creation of strategic ‘red bases’ in the interiors of the

villages and forests which were known as ‘liberated zones’.293 In the urban centres,

the urban proletariat and student guerrillas were instructed to kill the police, to build

up an arsenal, and to vandalise icons and statues of nineteenth- and twentieth-century

social reformers such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar,

Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and others, who were identified as capitalists

and promoters of the bourgeois cultural establishment.294 But this practice was not

supported by all.295 Pradip Basu has shown that the establishment of the Party and the

nature of its mission were fiercely debated from the beginning by ‘renegade’ leaders.

Ideological debates continued over Mazumdar’s uncompromising approach to land

tenure and land ceiling system, the annihilation campaign, the cult of masculinity, and

the use of students as guerrilla workers. These struggles within the Party gave birth to

a politics of abrupt decisionism and defection, which weakened the movement’s force

and momentum.296 As the Congress Party came to power in 1969 and in 1971, brutal

police and military operations were carried out to kill the Naxalites and to imprison or

assassinate the leaders. These counterinsurgency acts, along with problems on trust

and loyalty, shattered the movement’s base and paved the ground for the end of the

historic Naxalbari movement.297

292 Dasgupta, p. 32. 293 Ibid, pp. 40-41. 294 Banerjee, pp. 176-86. 295 Sushital Roy Chowdhury published his criticisms in the essays ‘Combat Left Adventurism’ and ‘On

Student-Youth Movement’. Saroj Datta replied to them variously in ‘On Subhash Bose’ and ‘In

Defence of Iconoclasm’. Charu Mazumdar expressed his wholehearted support for vandalism: ‘The

colonial education system of our country teaches us to hate our county and the common people […]

everyone believing in revolutionary ideology and the Thought of Mao Tse Tung should regard it as his

sacred responsibility to create hatred against the educational system. If therefore, out of hatred for the

system, the students break chairs and tables or burn records, no revolutionary has any right to discourage

them.’ Quoted in Banerjee, p. 181. For an overview, see Dasgupta 68-78; Banerjee pp. 50-53, pp. 178-

84. 296 Pradip Basu, Towards Naxalbari (1953-1967): An Account of Inner-Party Ideological Struggle

(Kolkata: Progressive Publishers, 2000), p. 7, p. 18. 297 Though the Naxalbari movement in Bengal was over in 1972, Maoist movements came back in the

late 1990s and soon gained strong footing in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Orissa.

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In popular media, solidly owned by the bourgeoisie, this final urban phase of

the movement, such as the vandalistic and violent acts, was branded as the politics of

Naxalism and caricatured. Biplab Dasgupta notes that the Naxalbari movement

received a negative ‘enthusiastic response’ in the press. Most newspapers or editorials

would condemn these activities as ‘misguided acts’ of some romantic brilliant and

revolutionary youths who were reacting against the parliamentarianism of their parent

party.298 He shows, by giving examples from various contemporary dailies, how ‘the

press would even go to the extent of inventing stories to keep [negative] popular

interest alive in the Naxalites’.299 For him, the link with the Chinese Cultural

Revolution, just after China’s War with India, ‘made stimulating reading’, gathering

popular bias against the Naxalites. In view of the anti-communist tradition of the

Indian press, the sensationalised reports were meant to scare the uncommitted and the

initiated and to consolidate anti-communist opinions across the nation. Shatarupa

Sengupta, in a recent study, tells us that the leading newspaper in Bengal,

Anandabazar Patrika, published a series of articles that defined the movement as

anarchic and linked it with CPI (M) to discredit the United Front government.300 But

this kind of negative representation was not only manufactured by the bourgeois-

established media; it was also engineered by the Naxalbari mouthpieces such as

Deshabrati, Liberation, and Frontier. Dasgupta notes that in order to highlight and

condemn the ideological struggles within the Left parties and establish a mass basis

for the newly formed CPI (M-L), Liberation would often eulogise how the Party’s

work in rural areas was enthusiastically supported by the agriculturalists. When the

Naxalbari violence was at its peak, Liberation repeatedly published and glorified the

gruesome acts of murder by the Naxalbari cadres.301 For Shatarupta Sengupta, these

There have been multiple counter-insurgencies from the state and state-sponsored bodies. For an

overview, see The Naxal Movement: Causes, Linkages, Policy Options, ed. by P. V. Ramana (Delhi:

Pearson Longman, 2008); Maoism in India: Reincarnation of Ultra-Left Wing Radicalism in the

Twentieth-Century, ed. by. Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajat Kumar Kujur (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010);

India and Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned, ed. by Sumit Ganguly and David P. Fidler (Abingdon:

Routledge, 2009); and Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011). 298 Dasgupta, p. 227. 299 Ibid, p. 227. 300 Shatarupa Sengupta, ‘Media Representations of the Naxalite Movement, 1967-1972’, in Discourses

on Naxalite Movement (1967-2009): Insights into Radical Left Politics, ed. by Pradip Basu (Kolkata:

Setu Prakashani, 2010), p. 82. 301 For instance, in one issue (August 1969) they write: ‘People expressed their hatred for this class

enemy by painting slogans with his blood’; in another (September, 1969): ‘I hit the agent on the head

and killed him with one stroke. But it did not seem enough, so the peasants cut him into three pieces

and one of them even drove his knife deep into the belly of the dead landlord’, and so on. See Dasgupta,

pp. 45-46.

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acts created a ‘Rashomon effect’. Almost all the newspapers were highlighting the

same acts of violence but for different ideological reasons, thus promoting the Naxalite

figure as terroristic and inhuman. Sengupta concludes, ‘It was impossible for people

to excavate the truth from the layers of the dominant images and ideologies. The media

failed to address these contradictory pictures and the conditions responsible for the

crisis’.302

This kind of representation remained dominant in the literary writings as well.

Writing mainly from metropolitan locations, writers who hardly had any knowledge

of the socio-economic problems in the peripheries of Bengal, or writers who had

themselves been Naxalites in their early years but had abandoned the movement and

were writing now in reaction to it, portrayed a predominantly negative or confusing

picture of the movement. As Nirmal Ghosh, one of the first to write about this

movement, notes in Naxalibarir Andolon o Bangla Sahitya (1981), that the Naxalite

in some of the popular novels appears variously as a terrorist, an anarchist, or a

mentally challenged human being: ‘In most of the writers, there is a strong tendency

either to condemn the Naxalbari politics or to provoke the conservative Bengali

sentiment in order to identify the Naxalites as bloodsucking monsters.’303 He lists

numerous novels and short stories in this context, by such noted writers as Samaresh

Majumdar, Samaresh Basu, Sunil Gangyopadhyay Ashim Ray, and others, but finds

only Mahasweta Devi, and, to some extent, Gunamay Manna and Swarna Mitra,

interested in exploring larger issues of social and economic inequality in the rural and

urban areas of Bengal. Another critic, Phatik Chand Ghosh, notes in a recent work

(2012) that the movement created a huge interest in political fiction writing in the

Bengali literary sphere, but there was hardly any critical engagement with the serious

issues plaguing the rural and urban societies in postcolonial India.304 Most Naxalbari

302 Sengupta, Discourses, p. 87. 303 Nirmal Ghosh, Naxalbarir Andolon o Bangla Sahitya [The Naxalbari Movement and Bengali

Literature] (Kolkata: Karuna Prakashani, 1981), p. 221. My translation. This is a noted critical survey

of Bengali Naxalite fiction in the 1970s – the body of work with which I am primarily engaged in this

chapter. For readers interested in Bengali Naxalite literature, these survey works are helpful: Naxalbari

and After: A Frontier Anthology, ed. by Samar Sen, Debabrata Panda, and Asish Lahiri, 2 vols (Kolkata:

Kathasilpi, 1978); Naxal Andoler Golpo [Short Stories of the Naxal Movement], ed. by Bijit Ghosh

(Kolkata: Punascha, 1999); Phatik Chanda Ghosh, Bidroher Srote Ekti Taranga: Naxalbari Parba o

Bangla Kabita [A Wave in the Tides of Revolt: The Naxalbari Movement and Bengali Poetry] (Kolkata:

Samikkha Prakashan, 2004); Sumanta Banerjee, Thema Book of Naxalite Poetry (Kolkata: Thema,

2009); Red on Silver: Naxalites in Cinema, ed. by Pradip Basu (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012). 304 Phatik Chandra Ghosh, Naxal Andolan or Bangla Kathasahitya [Naxalbari Movement and the

Bengali Novel] (Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Sangsad, 2012), p. 42. It is worth noting that in comparison

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fiction is distorted, purposeful, sensationalised and commercialised.305 The main

reason for this is the middle-class location of the writers, who, as Ghosh notes, openly

denounced the acts of annihilation by the Naxalites but kept silent about the massive

state-sponsored terrorism. He also thinks that the urban Naxalites, who had relatively

less knowledge of the urgent socio-economic issues in the rural areas, did not reach

out to the writers.306

I agree with Ghosh’s criticism of the middle-class writers’ political silence and

sensationalised rendering of the movement, which Mahasweta Devi has consistently

lampooned in her works. However, I think both Nirmal Ghosh and Phatik Chand

Ghosh are more interested in what these writers say in their content than how they say

them. A cursory reading of the Naxalite novels tells us that the writers have from the

very beginning experimented with style and exploited several formal modes, devices,

and genres. There is the Bildungsroman mode in which an urban or rural youth who

witnesses everyday socio-economic and physical violence decides to join the

movement and dies of state terror, or a disillusioned youth who realises the futility of

such a movement but cannot give up hope on revolutionary politics.307 There is also

the action-adventure mode where an urban youth goes to a village and joins the ranks

to the richness and depth of Naxalite creative literature, critical work on this field is lacking and

unorganised. Phatik Chand Ghosh also notes this in his 2012 book Bengali Novel, and tells his readers

to take his book not as an informed literary-textual engagement, but as a critical survey of Naxalite

fiction in the last forty years. Apart from these critical contributions by the Ghoshes which are

unfortunately not translated into English, one can consult these Bengali works for a wider context:

Sottor Doshok [The Seventies], ed. by Anil Acharya (Kolkata: Anustup, 1980); Amar Bhattacharya,

Naxalbari Andoloner Pramanyo Tathyo Sankyolon [Edition on the Documents of the Naxalbari

Movement] (Kolkata: Naya Istehar, 1998); Sei Doshok [That Decade], ed. by Pulakesh Mandol and

Jaya Mitra, (Kolkata: Pyapirus, 1994); Saroj Bandyopadhyay, Bangla Uponyas: Dwandwik Dwarpan

[Bengali Novel: The Dialectical Mirror] (Kolkata: Paschimbango Bangla Akademi, 1996). There is not

much work on this field in English. Two essays about the recent Naxalite novels of Jhumpa Lahiri and

Neel Mukherjee may be helpful: Nina Martyris, ‘The Naxal Novel’, Dissent Magazine, Fall 2014

<https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-naxal-novel> [accessed 14 January, 2017]; and Pavan

Kumar Malreddy, ‘Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency’,

in South-Asian Fictions in English: Contemporary Transformations, ed. by Alex Tickell (London:

Palgrave, 2016), pp. 217-33. 305 Ghosh, Bengali Novel, pp. 23-24. 306 He writes, ‘From the very beginning, the Naxalites have virulently attacked the “opportunistic and

safe” locations of middle class writers, wounded them in many of their theoretical writings and political

speeches, termed every writer who imitated a middle class writer a cultural enemy, and alienated each

and every one whosoever did not conform to the political agenda of the Naxalites’, p. 24. 307 See these works: Swarno Mitra Gramey Chalo [Let’s March to the Village] (Murshidabad: People’s

Book Agency, 1972); Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Sheola [Moss] (Kolkata: Ananda, 1977); Gunamay

Manna, Shalboni [Shalboni] (Kolkata: Aruna Prakashani, 1978); Samaresh Majumdar, Kalbela [The

Ominous Hour] (Kolkata: Ananda, 1983); Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Ami o Banabihari [Banabihari

and I] (Kolkata: Ajkaal, 2000).

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of revolutionary leaders to carry out bloody annihilation campaigns;308 or where a

repentant returnee comes back from a torturous life in prison to his old town only to

find that nothing has changed, and turns into either a solitary figure and a madman, or

a diseased and infected wretch slowly advancing to death.309 The use of these different

modes and devices challenges Ghosh’s suggestion that this creative body of literature

is homogeneous and written solely to entertain the reading public and instruct them

about the tragic consequences of romantic idealism. Instead, I believe that this

literature may also be seen to explore the question of the crisis of representation itself

– how to respond to the various puzzling questions of why the movement broke out,

why students were angry and went on to ‘annihilate’ the police, how ideological

struggles within the Party influenced them, etc. A study of form and mode, as I will

show below, helps us understand how an author engages with an event, what issues

are explored, highlighted, and condemned, and what was left out and for what reasons.

Instead of criticizing the use of distorted and fragmentary formal strategies and

narratives, as Phatik Ghosh does, it is more important to ask how they have laid out

their narrative. This is a crucial question as it leads us to the corollary question of the

politics of fiction writing itself. Such politics does not receive enough attention in

these critical writings on the Naxalite creative literature; thus, despite its admirable

coverage and commentary, the works of the two Ghoshes seem to suggest that

Naxalbari fiction is not artistically successful as fiction. This is almost the same kind

of criticism we noted in C. Paul Varughese’s attack on Bhabani Bhattacharya’s famine

work. As Partha Pratim Bandyopadhyay sums up cogently for us:

The writings based on the Naxalbari events or characters could not in many

cases stand the test of time because they were written mainly from the

perspective of direct engagement with the events or from the intimate life

histories of the insurgents. From these vantage points, it was impossible for

the writers to render artistic objectivity to the Movement. And those who saw

it from outside, or read about it, attempted to give self-styled imaginary

meanings to the event. As a result, the stories and the novels could hardly

become good art.310

308 Most notably in Shankar Basu, Komunis [Communist] (Kolkata: Barnona, 1974); Krishna

Chakraborty, Chorabali [Quicksand] (Kolkata: Chirayat, 1981); Bani Basu, Antarghat [Sabotage]

(Kolkata: Ananda, 1989); Shyamal Gangyopadhyay, Ekada Ghatak [Once a Killer] (Kolkata:

Biswabani, 1994). 309 For instance, Mukhopadhyay, Sheola; and Samaresh Basu, Mahakaler Rather Ghora [The Pegasus

of Infinite Time] (Kolkata: Ananda, 1977). 310 Partha Pratim Bandyopadhyay, Postmodern Bhabna o Onyanyo (Naxal Andolon: Golpo Upanyaser

Probonota: Du Ekti Mantyobyo) [The Postmodern Thoughts and Others [The Naxalite Movement:

Stories and Novels: One or Two Things]] (Kolkata: Radical Impression, 1986), p. 67.

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Rather than evaluating what a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ art is, in this chapter I will argue

that a writer’s adoption of a particular mode is a politically mediated act. I choose here

the works of Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya because most of the popular

and acclaimed Naxalite novels (mentioned in the footnotes above) – and here I agree

with the Ghoshes – are prejudiced in their indifference, or even hostility, to the

Naxalite event, rather than holistically exploring the issues and historically situating

the plight of the peasants and the urban poor. Their modal preferences appear to be

predominantly influenced by their ideological values which appear at times to be pro-

establishment and at other times to be politically confusing. Devi in two of her

Naxalite novels, Mother of 1084 (1974) and Operation? – Bashai Tudu (1978),

predominantly uses a quest mode, which allows her to use a protagonist, who has little

knowledge about Naxalism or is not ideologically committed to it, to explore what

Naxalism stands for. What is particularly striking about her works is the way she uses

the categories of gender and caste to explore the links between patriarchy, bourgeois

establishment and postcolonial consumerism in 1960s Calcutta, the casteist and

corrupt nature of Left politics in postcolonial rural Bengal, and the logic behind an

armed peasant struggle. The quest mode here becomes the vehicle of a critical social-

scientific investigation into the politics of Naxalism. The mode also undermines its

rational-analytical power through the use of fractured times and memory, and of

surreal and fantastic elements, which, I will argue, suggest the difficulty of writing a

linear narrative of the movement and point at the task of a writer’s giving voice to the

voiceless. In Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novels, Harbart (1994) and Kāngāl Mālshāt

(2003; Warcry of the Beggars), the narrative is structured as an urban fantasy. This

mode, produced through a stylistic use of supernatural elements and the blurring of

the rational and the non-rational in order to understand the conjunctural nature of

urban space and modernity, allows a critical rendering of middle-class complacency

and consumerism, of the conservative politics of the Left, and of the revival and

implementation of Naxalite tactics and politics by the urban poor. In his article ‘The

Current of Critical Irrealism’, Michael Löwy311 holds that writers from E. T. A.

Hoffmann to Kafka and Beckett have complicated the realist form by importing within

311 Michael Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism: “A Moonlit Enchanted Night”’, in Adventures in

Realism, ed. by Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 193-206.

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a narrative of sequential rational plot development elements of the supernatural, the

spectral, and the ghostly, which are consciously used as socio-textual responses to

capitalist modernity in the European metropolises. For Löwy, ‘irreal’ does not mean

‘unreal’ or ‘anti-real’. Irrealism is an extension of realism where writers using the form

to document social reality do not conform to the standard definition of realism, ‘the

rules of representing the reality as it is’.312 Building on Lukács’ reading of critical

realism (in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism), Löwy posits that the term irreal

could be expanded to many genres including dystopian, utopian, oneiric, and fairytale

narratives. But he also alerts us to the fact that many of these genres, such as the

fairytale, do not necessarily harbour a critique and in most cases are conservative in

nature. He thus speaks of a critical irrealism where critique is not to be understood ‘as

relating to a rational argument, a systematic opposition, or an explicit discourse; more

often, in irrealist art, it takes the form of protest, outrage, disgust, anxiety, or angst’.313

In both Devi and Bhattacharya, we encounter rage against state-sponsored violence

and civil society’s numb responses, against the consumerist logic of urban

development and gentrification, and against the uprooting of the poor from urban

spaces. They use the dialectic of rational-non-rational to critique bourgeois

establishment politics as well as bourgeois media and realist discourses. I will show

below how the quest and urban fantastic modes are used to make a careful, committed,

and layered study of the specific historical conjuncture of the Naxalbari movement

and of its aftermath.

Mahasweta Devi’s Naxalite Novels and the Quest Mode

Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016) is a complex writer, not only because of her narrative

experimentations but also because of the number of terrains she traverses in addition

to that of a fiction writer: a lifelong activist for women and tribal rights, a documenter

of oral history, a pamphleteer, and a journalist. Much has already been said of this

skill and virtuosity,314 but their impact on her fiction writing has still not been

312 Ibid, p. 191. 313 Ibid, p. 196; emphasis in original. 314 See for instance, Mahasweta Devi, ‘The Author in Conversation’ in Imaginary Maps: Three Stories

by Mahasweta Devi, trans. by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak (London: Routledge, 1995), pp, ix-xxii; Dust

on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. by Maitreyi Ghatak (Kolkata: Seagull,

1997); Malini Bhattacharya, ‘Mahasweta Devi: Activist and Writer’, Economic and Political Weekly,

32.19 (1997), 1003-04.

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adequately attended to. This section will try to address this social and activist element

in her writing through a reading of the irrealist mode in her Naxalite novels. The first

thing that strikes us about Devi’s Naxalite novels is that both are one-day narratives.

Also, the focal characters of the novels, Brati and Bashai, are in fact absent throughout

(dead or disappeared), and it is through the protagonists’ (Sujata’s and Kali’s)

exploring the reasons of absence that they come back to life. Mother of 1084315 is set

on the second death anniversary, which is also the twenty-second birthday, of Brati

Chatterjee, Sujata Chatterjee’s son and a Naxalite youth killed by the police and

reduced to an identification number of 1084. The novel revolves around Sujata’s

search for answers for Brati’s murder, the search being shown through the exploration

of Sujata’s traumatised psyche and her meetings with other women affected by the

movement – Somu’s mother (Somu being Brati’s friend and a fellow revolutionary)

and Nandini, Brati’s beloved and comrade in arms. These aspects allow Devi to

explore the patriarchal and consumerist nature of postcolonial urban societies.

Operation? Bashai Tudu316 is about Kali Santra’s journey in the middle of Charsha

forest, West Bengal, on a day in July 1977 to caution Bashai about his police warrant.

Kali is a loyal and veteran CPI (M) cadre who has deep sympathy for Bashai, a Santhal

landless labourer who was also a member of the Party but has turned renegade for the

Party’s long silence on caste issues and on minimum wage for agricultural workers.

Through Kali’s memories during the journey, we get to know that Bashai has killed

four jotedars in the region and has also been killed four times by the police and the

army. On each occasion, his corpse was identified either by Kali or by Bashai’s fellow

labourers, but somehow something was wrong and Bashai has continued to come back

from death, which has caused the local party members (who are either jotedars or

upper-caste people) and the police to panic about Bashai’s superhuman abilities. Kali

has been sent again to negotiate with him, and it is through his memories of past visits

and their dialogues that Devi portrays the caste-based Left politics, the jotedar and

police violence, and the subaltern resistance in rural societies and peripheries of

Bengal.

315 Mother of 1084 was published as Hajar Churashir Maa (Kolkata: Karuna Prakashani, 1974) and

translated into English by Samik Bandyopadhyay in 1996 (Kolkata: Seagull). All quotations are taken

from the translated edition. 316 Operation? – Bashai Tudu was published in Agnigarbha which also included the short story

‘Draupadi’. Both works were translated (respectively by Samik Bandyopadhyay and by Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak) and published into a book, Bashai Tudu, edited by Samik Bandyopadhyay

(Kolkata: Thema, 1990). All quotations are taken from this edition.

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Irrealism in the narratives then emerges mainly through the element of the non-

death of the urban Naxalite/rural insurgent figure. But Devi could have also used a

multiple-day narrative for the same end. My contention here is that Devi uses the one-

day narrative to suggest that it is possible to engage with and analyse complex political

and economic phenomena, and demystify the repressive and ideological apparatuses

at work, by exploring the activities of a single day. Through the expansive use of time

in a one-day narrative, a writer is able to historicise the event and forge a totality of

social relations in the bourgeois/jotedar domination and the Naxalite/tribal resistance.

Using one-day narratives to engage with broader historical aspects is, of course,

nothing new; James Joyce made a compelling demonstration with Ulysses.317 Through

a powerful use of memory, dialogues, monologues, stream-of-consciousness

techniques, mythological-structural qualities, and intertextual references, Joyce

explored the deeper meanings of Jewish history, Irish nationalism, mourning and

melancholia, the cultural and linguistic differences between Britain and Ireland, the

capitalist consumerist overhaul of colonial Ireland, etc., all within the conversations

of an otherwise ordinary day, 16 June, 1904. Before Devi, Indian writers such as Mulk

Raj Anand, Satinath Bhaduri, and Gopal Halder have used this format.318 But what is

striking about Devi’s use is setting the one-day time frame for a quest narrative where

Sujata and Kali are to find out as much about Brati, Bashai, their politics and current

society as about themselves. These quests, as I will argue later, are not successful

which suggests the difficult nature of life and living in the periphery as well as the

complex task of literary representation of the peripheral postcolonial subject by the

outsider-author. Devi builds these failed quests through a number of experimentations

in the narratives and through a deep sense of attachment to historical reality. As one-

day narratives, the main experiment lies in the use of time and temporality. There is a

linear development of plot (the activities of the day) which is juxtaposed with a non-

linear time of action (historical time). In order to build this dialectic of linearity and

non-linearity, Devi uses the resources of dream, dialogue, and memory, which both

affectively politicise Sujata and critically educate Kali, and allow her narrator to enter

317 See James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000). 318 See Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1935); Satinath Bhaduri, Jagari

(Kolkata: Bengal Publishers, 1945), trans. as The Vigil by Lila Roy (Bombay: Asia Publishing, 1963);

Gopal Halder, Tridiba [Three Days Trilogy] in Gopal Halder Rochonasomogro 3 vols [The Complete

Works of Gopal Halder 3 vols], ed. by Rajib Niyogi, vol I (Kolkata: A Mukherjee and Co., 1949), pp.

1-524.

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and deploy scathing criticism of the state, the middle class, and civil society. The one-

day narratorial form of the novel becomes a political ploy and a medium of social

investigation and justice. This section will understand her use of the quest mode and

her critical irrealism through a discussion of four elements – dream, memory,

narratorial participation, and the non-death of the insurgent.

Linear Plot and Non-Linear Action Time: Dream, Dialogue, and

Memory

Mother begins with a section titled ‘Morning’. Sujata’s sleep is broken by an oft-

recurring dream of her labour pain during Brati’s birth. The narration mixes past with

present to suggest the intense nature of pain and to draw our attention to Brati:

In her dreams Sujata was back on a morning twenty-two years ago. She often

went back to that morning. She found herself packing her bag: towel, blouse,

sari, toothbrush, soap. Sujata is fifty-three now. In her dreams she sees a Sujata

at thirty-one, busy packing her bag. A Sujata still young, heavy with the child

she bore in her womb, packed her bag carefully item by item as she prepared

to bring Brati into this world. That Sujata’s face twisted with pain again and

again, she clamped her teeth on her lips to check the cry, the Sujata of the

dreams waiting for Brati to be born.319

Sujata has dreamt this episode so many times that she can distinctly remember all the

nitty-gritty of it. The ensuing narration does not divulge the reason of the recurrence,

but does reveal her family’s indifference to her demands and needs in these difficult

periods. But not the entire narration is in the past. The narrator uses a present tense to

tell us Sujata’s age. This is useful because we get to understand the recurrent nature

of the dream through the present indefinite use of tense and we are informed that Brati

was born twenty-two years ago. This information is important because today, we are

told later, is Brati’s birthday, hinting at a link between the narration of pain in labour

and the description of her family’s cold attitude. The incompatibility, or rather, the

serious tone of the narration (as against the supposed celebratory mood for the

auspicious day) becomes clear as soon as we are told that Brati is dead. Sujata did not

know what he was killed for, and noticed that his family helped the police erase all

data from public notice, all objects that memorialise Brati from public view: ‘There

319 Devi, Mother, p. 1.

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were so many questions before his death, and so many after. Question marks. Rows

and endless rows of question marks’.320 Devi’s narrator does not tell us right away that

two years have passed and Sujata has come to see through more clearly the hypocrisy

of her family, of economic exhibitionism and moral degradation, and the criminality

in shutting a voice that posed uncomfortable questions to them. The narrator slowly

develops her character, sometimes through a deep-time narration where a past

narration explores further events in the past to establish coherence between events, or

through sudden time shifts to the narratorial present within a longer flashback. These

techniques push the narration further away in deep-time; for instance, Sujata’s

thoughts about her family are broken by a telephone call, which in turn reminds her of

the telephone call two years ago from a morgue called Kantapukur reporting Brati’s

death. This deep-time narration suggests that the lives of Sujata and Brati are

interlinked. Brati may be dead, but Sujata brings him back every day through her

dreams, thoughts, and memories, in order to understand why he died, what his words

meant on the day he was killed, what he was like not as a son but as a political human

being, and finally and fundamentally why she failed to understand him.

Brati was soft-hearted, fearful, and imaginative, ‘haunted by fears, the fears

that haunt an imaginative child’: ‘A funeral procession in the night shouting

“Haribol!” was frightening, the street performer masquerading as a bandit was

frightening. But then he outgrew all his fears’.321 He loved to read poems about death

(in a line or two, Brati is already an adolescent). Sujata can still see him sitting on the

window sill and reading poetry, which is then followed by the information that he

considers his father a class enemy – this is clearly Brati in his early college days. So,

in a few lines Devi’s narrator develops Brati’s character as a sensitive, strong, and

politically conscious human being. It is, however, not clear whether the narrator is

divulging this information objectively or whether this is all part of Sujata’s dreams:

‘When Sujata saw Brati in her dreams these days, a part of her mind would insist it

was just a dream. Brati did not exist. It was just a dream. The other part of the mind

went on insisting that it was not a dream, it was real’.322 This technique allows Devi

to create the semblance of transparent narration. If, indeed, we consider that it is

320 Ibid, p. 12. 321 Ibid, p. 13. 322 Ibid, p. 14.

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Sujata’s dreams that kicks off the narration, it could be argued that the entire narration

is an extended dream event. Dream and reality become mixed. But note that Devi does

not use dream to alter the course of reality. Dreams, memories, and recollections help

her explore Brati’s character and engage sympathetically with the Naxalbari

movement. The diegetic narrator sometimes pluralises the consciousness and speaks

of how a movement for social and economic equality was brutally murdered by the

city’s police, bourgeois middle class, and civil society; how these young people who

sacrificed their lives for a cause were murdered with impunity: ‘They [Brati and his

friends] were all sentenced to death. Anybody was permitted to kill them. People in

all the parties, people of all creeds had the unlimited, democratic right to kill these

young men who had rejected the parties of the establishment’.323 From this sarcastic

narration, the narrator then places vital political arguments, ‘The questions remained:

Was Brati’s death futile? Did his death stand for a massive NO’.324 The moment we

begin to think it is the narrator asking these questions, we are told that it is Sujata who

is thinking about all these while looking at the things in Brati’s room. Thus, the

suggestion here is that Sujata has begun to take note of the documents in Brati’s room,

to work hard to recollect what Brati said and what they meant, to uncover the deeper

meanings, and to politicise herself; that she has been thinking all these weeks and

months about Brati, and trying to put together bits and pieces to find answers when

the police and her family had closed the case file. In these psychological

investigations, dreams are the reflections of her daily work. It is in dreams that she

understands the logic behind Brati’s political decisions and the hypocrisy of bourgeois

life, that she should have stopped him from visiting his friends on that fateful night:

‘In her dream, Sujata knew that Brati would not go to Ronu’s house, he would go to

warn Somu and his group. In her dreams yearned to rush out and drag Brati back by

the hand. She yearned to scream out – Brati, come back!’325 Dreams thus appear to be

not only a useful ploy to enter the main narration, but also a medium through which

Sujata’s psychological journey and her affective politicisation are executed. In the

quote above, it is not only Brati’s lies that Sujata spots, but also her own intense love

for Brati and her passionate desire to correct her faults, to bring Brati back to life. Her

motherly self, her sensitivity, and her emotions are not sacrificed by Devi for the

323 Ibid, pp. 19-20. 324 Ibid, p. 20. 325 Ibid, p. 53.

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development of her political self. It is after all a novel about a mother and the loss of

her child to state violence. As the narrator says, ‘Who is Sujata? Only a mother. Who

are those hundreds of thousands whose hearts, even now, are being gnawed by

questions? Only mothers’.326

Contrary to the narration of the Brati episodes, Sujata’s family is described in

a fairly linear fashion. The descriptions here mark the patriarchal-consumerist nature

of her family and her growing politicisation. As an upper-middle class woman whose

husband is an established chartered accountant and whose daughters are married or

engaged to top-level salaried executives or businessmen settled abroad, Sujata’s job

in the family has been to remain silent and do her work as a dutiful wife and mother:

‘She was not one of those radicals, the independent woman conscious of her rights

[…] Sujata was quiet, taciturn and old fashioned’.327 But she was always self-sufficient

as the childbirth episode has suggested. Her mother-in-law never went with her

because she disliked Sujata’s pregnancies (her husband died after Dibyanath, her only

son and Sujata’s husband, was born), and Dibyanath never accompanied her because

he found it unmanly. At the same time, Devi’s narrator tells us: ‘But he noticed things,

he noticed Sujata, he had to be sure that Sujata was fit enough to bear a child again’.328

Here is a glimpse into the gendered nature of bourgeois family where women are

considered a medium for an entire praxis of social reproduction. Sujata knows that

Dibyanath has extra-marital affairs, but his mother indulges it: ‘For her it was a mark

of her son’s virility; her son was no henpecked husband’.329 What these glimpses

suggest is that gender is not about sexual difference. The mother-in-law’s thoughts are

an indication of her absorption of the deeply sexist elements in patriarchal societies.

Education and urbanity do not necessarily bring rational thinking. Indeed, the qualities

and values one considers rational, progressive, and modern more often than not betray

deeply-rooted conservative ideologies. Pointing these out is understood as a crime in

a consumerist bourgeois society, like when the diegetic narrator says: ‘If Brati drank

like Jyoti, if he could go about drunk like Neepa’s husband, if he could flirt with the

slip of a typist the way Brati’s father did […] then they could have accepted Brati as

326 Ibid, p. 51. 327 Ibid, p. 46. 328 Ibid, p. 3. 329 Ibid, p. 31.

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one of them’.330 These thoughts and questions are consolidated in the fourth and final

section of the novel, ‘Evening’. The today of the narrative, that is Brati’s birth and

death anniversary, is also the day of the engagement party of Tuli, Sujata’s youngest

daughter. Devi gives here a vignette of the established bourgeois upper- and middle-

class life in Kolkata in the 1960s: Sujata’s eldest daughter, Neepa flirting with her

brother-in-law, Balai; Tuli’s fiancé, Tony Kapadia talking about the profits he has

made by selling Indian handicrafts in Sweden; and her friends being involved in

debauchery, drinking, and discussion of social and economic development in India.

Through these sharp pictures full of irony and bitter sarcasm, Devi shows how

bhadrata (decency) in this postcolonial urban society means playing the games of

consumerist capitalism, where the gendered role means either (for a distancing,

unassimilated woman like Sujata) meeting the entire spectrum of gendered social

reproduction (child bearing, child rearing, domestic labour, etc.), or (for assimilated

women serving patriarchal needs and desires) allowing the female body to be available

for objectification. ‘Auteurs’ Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray have powerfully captured

these aspects in their Calcutta films.331 As in the films, the objectification of women’s

bodies and their sexuality, the commodification of culture, the unending accumulation

of material wealth, and the strict adoption of political conservatism are considered the

standard aspirations for the upper-middle-class family here. Although patriarchal

nature is tokenised through Dibyanath (in his powerful presence in both family and

professional circles), it is mainly through the rendering of social and cultural life of

Sujata’s family and neighbours that Devi implies a deep nexus between patriarchy,

family, and gendered roles. In such gendered social structure, Sujata’s eldest

daughter’s public humiliation of her husband as impotent and her glorified

justifications for her extra-marital affair with her brother-in-law, or Tuli’s marriage to

a businessman who is settled abroad, appears as much a pattern of patriarchal designs

as Dibyanath’s dominance in the family. When, without informing Sujata, Tuli invites

Saroj Pal, the inspector who killed Brati, to her engagement party, Sujata cannot hold

her fury any longer; she cries out loud with rage and falls unconscious to the floor.

The novel ends here.

330 Ibid, p. 31. 331 See the ‘Calcutta trilogies’ of Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen.

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Sujata’s screaming could be read as an act of political agency. We have noted

that she has already politicised herself, and distanced herself from her family and

become silent. Her silence has often made her family members think that she is an

‘unnatural’ mother, an ‘odd’ wife who does not mourn her son. But we are told that

the day her family attempted to dispose of Brati’s objects and invited Saroj Pal to

officially separate their relations from Brati, they no longer mattered, or even existed,

for her. Devi’s narration here is dramatic but adequate to represent the depth of her

hatred for them: ‘The way he [Dibyanath] had behaved that day [… it] had burst upon

her with explosive force. Like one of those massive meteors crashing upon the ancient

world billions of years ago. Like one of those explosions that broke up the solid mass

of the earth into continents separated by the oceans.’332 This immense depth of hatred

only escalated and turned into rage with Pal’s visits. Pal is introduced as a voice in the

beginning who asks the family to come to Kantapukur and identify Brati. There is

nothing to identify. Brati’s mutilated body and thrashed face, and Pal’s order that his

body cannot be taken home, serve to justify the rage against Pal’s character. Later

when he visits the family, Sujata is shocked to see him behaving like a perfect

gentleman: ‘suave, sophisticated, handsome, the smile of a Prince Charming, a

flawless intonation, Yes Mr Chatterjee, I quite assure you […] Mrs Chatterjee, I

understand, I too have a mother’.333 Sujata cannot believe the contrasting nature of his

character: he is not an illiterate, bloodthirsty, rustic, unkempt, dirty human, but an

educated, urban elite, sophisticated individual. Again, the sarcasm and bitterness are

too clear in the narration where Pal refers to the fact that he also has a mother, and we

understand through Devi’s narration that he has hardly any idea what pain a mother

goes through for the loss of an offspring. Devi also uses a juxtaposition of oppositional

voices to build Pal’s character for the context. ‘Saroj Pal. Saroj Pal. No pardon for

You. Empty, empty threat. For two years Saroj Pal has conducted “this massive

investigation, search, and punitive operation. His supreme efficiency and courage has

been […]”’.334 The first part is clearly an allusion to the Naxalite graffiti on cruel

inspectors, while the second part has a journalistic voice, reminiscent of the bourgeois

media that promoted and celebrated the representatives of the repressive machineries

of the state. Through this technique, Devi’s narrator extracts sympathy from us for the

332 Devi, Mother, p. 8. 333 Ibid, p. 29. 334 Ibid, p. 28.

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Naxalite cause and manages to add more depth to Sujata’s hatred for this character.

Thus, when Sujata sees Pal invited to her house and enjoying a life of comfort after so

many killings, her pain and fury burst open in the form of her scream. The scream

shatters the limits of toleration, her silences, and bursts open the deep rage within her

– a tremendous energy to defy and resist the current culture of state violence and

patriarchal injunctions, of consumerism and moral degradation. It is a declaration that

she will not be co-opted any longer into this bourgeois project of the commodification

of body and soul; she will resist both the repressive and ideological powers of the

gendered social reproduction. In a recent reading of the novel, Srila Roy writes, ‘At

the end of the novel, Sujata brings the revolutionary cause into the heart of the

domestic sphere in her singular act of patriarchal defiance; an act that powerfully weds

the personal with the political in the revolutionary imaginary’.335

However, the act should not be understood only as a result of Sujata’s

psychological explorations. The platform for this act is also built through her dialogues

with other women affected by the movement. This is where the non-linear action time

of Sujata’s psychological investigations is juxtaposed with a linear plot development

in order to help Sujata identify her class’s and her own blindfolded assumptions and

practices and to educate and activate herself politically. The dialogues appear in the

next two sections, Noon and Afternoon, when Sujata meets Somu’s mother and

Nandini. Somu’s family lives in a refugee settlement in South Kolkata. They had come

here from East Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. For the ensuing twenty

years, the situation only worsened for them.336 Through Sujata’s gaze, we see the

current condition of the house: ‘the thatched roof had come down on one side and had

to be supported with a stick. The low bedstead was no longer there. Bricks on the floor

supported a flat wooden plank instead’.337 Somu’s family has been destroyed; a few

months after Somu’s death, his father died of heart attack and his elder sister had to

take care of the family. She has been facing public humiliation, rejection, and abuse

for more than a year. Somu’s mother cries constantly, being scared of the future. She

says to Sujata, ‘Didi, my daughter tells me she’ll never get a job because she is Somu’s

335 Srila Roy, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in the Naxalbari Movement

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 65. 336 Through choosing this family, Devi also tells us why a large section of the urban Naxalite youth was

actually from the refugee colonies. On this, see Roy pp. 27-28; Raghab Bandyopadhyay’s memoir,

Journal Sottor [70s’ Journal] (Kolkata: Ananda, 2000), especially pp. 16-17. 337 Devi, Mother, p. 58.

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sister. Can it be true, Didi?’338 In Sujata’s first visit (this episode depicts her second),

they cried together; but now she variously points at their class divisions: ‘Don’t

compare yourself and my daughter, Didi. With all the contacts you have! [...] Didi, I

have no contacts, I don’t have the money to hush things up or get things done’.339 This

is a crucial passage through which Devi reveals how Sujata is made aware of her own

privileges, and how class conditions a seemingly universal affect, grief. Somu’s

mother is aware of the class divisions between her and Sujata, and the socio-economic

power Sujata holds in society. She sees Sujata as a winner in everyday life and herself

a loser. But Devi’s narrator makes us think that it is Sujata who has lost the game.

Despite all these anxieties and pains, Somu’s mother can at least cry at her loss, mourn

the dead, let the past go, and grapple with the present. But ‘Sujata could not weep

before those whose first concern at Brati’s death had been to seek a way to hush up

the news; her throat closed up tight. Somu’s mother wouldn’t understand’.340 The

narrator is sympathetic to Sujata’s cause, but the narration after this also suggests that

there is a link between class-difference and grief. Consider the narration:

Somu’s mother did not know that she had scored over Sujata; she had known

what Somu was up to. Sujata may have had an aristocratic bearing, a stiff upper

lip, a watch on her wrist and an expensive handloom sari. But Somu’s mother

did not know that Sujata as a mother had lost out to thousands of mothers, for

she had never known what Brati was up to.341

On the surface, the narration points to the different assumptions that these women in

grief make about each other, but a careful look shows that there is a connection made

between the possibility of acquiring knowledge and the social class that the acquirer

belongs to. Devi seems to suggest here that not only did Sujata not know Brati on an

everyday basis, she could not have known him either. This is indicated by the

exaggerated class markers: Sujata’s aristocratic bearing, stiff upper lip, a watch on the

wrist, etc. Although Brati and Sujata share the same class location, nominally at least,

they have digested different ideologies. Sujata has been a sympathetic and loving

mother to Brati, but she is too deeply co-opted within her class privileges and

boundaries to understand Brati, such as the change in his character or in his taste in

338 Ibid, p. 59. 339 Ibid, p. 59. 340 Ibid, p. 64. 341 Ibid, p. 69.

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dressing like an average person. Devi seems to suggest that Sujata’s dutiful

assimilation to her class and her practices of its privileges have precluded her from

adequately knowing Brati as a human being and as a political subject. Although there

is deep-seated grief within Sujata, the nature or expression of grief is highly marked

by class. Indeed, the narrator seems to imply a double meaning here in the ritual of

grief-making: if grief and silence make Sujata’s post-Brati everyday life a process of

piecing together answers for the solving of the puzzle, her social and economic

conditions also help maintain the everyday in that particular way – preventing her

from completing her task and her quest. To borrow from Srila Roy again, ‘While

Sujata rallies against expected norms of wifely devotion and submission to familial

authority, she is also the main agent for the preservation of inherited moral values’.342

Sujata feels emptied, lost to Somu’s mother, who despite facing enormous socio-

economic struggles, has her lost child’s memories safe with her for mourning and for

the negotiation with pain.

The process of affective politicisation is escalated in her meeting with Nandini,

a middle-class urban Naxalite woman. Nandini and Brati loved each other, and both

loved their city, Calcutta: ‘the people, the houses, the neon signs, red roses in a

wayside, florist’s stall, festoons on the streets, newspapers pasted on boards near the

bus stops, smiling faces, a beautiful image in a poem in a little magazine […]

everything spelt ecstasy; we couldn’t hold the joy; we felt explosive’.343 They dreamt

of living in these small joys and building a world where class differences would

disappear and social equality would prevail. But the dream was destroyed by the police

and the bourgeois Left. Nandini tells Sujata that they were betrayed by Anindya, who

joined the CPI (M-L) from another group as a renegade.344 Though Nandini does not

clarify which group Anindya belonged to, Calcutta in the 1970s saw a carnage for

political factionalism of the Left. Sumanta Banerjee writes that the CPI (M) considered

the CPI (M-L) as ‘renegades in league with the Congress, out to sabotage the Party’s

parliamentary seizure of power,’ while the CPI (M-L) branded the CPI (M) as

‘neorevisionists misdirecting the people’s struggle’.345 Banerjee adds that just before

342 Roy, p. 65. 343 Devi, Mother, p. 77; for a study on love and marriage in Naxalite narratives, see the chapter

‘Bhalobasha, Biye Biplab: On the Politics of Sexual Stories’ in Roy, Remembering, pp. 98-119. 344 Ibid, p. 72, p. 83. 345 Banerjee, p. 193.

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the elections in 1970, these two parties were engaged in ‘a bloody cycle of assaults

and counter-assaults, murders, and vendetta […] a senseless orgy of murders,

misplaced fury, sadistic tortures, acted out with the vicious norms of the

underworld’.346 Many of these feuds were orchestrated by the police, their spies, and

the hoodlums of the Congress Party.347 Anindya was one of these latter characters who

won the faith of his Naxalite friends and then divulged their secret information to the

police. Brati came to know of it later and went out to alert Somu, their friend Bijit, and

others, on the night he was killed. Nandini was not murdered but taken into custody.

She was tortured for information, sexually abused and disabled: she lost sight in one

of her eyes and is interned home now on medical grounds.348 Her parents tell her to

get married, but she cannot forget her politics, the torture, and the burn ‘in the heart

within’; neither can she forgive how easily the city and its people threw them away

and forgot about them and their struggles. When she came out of jail, she could not

believe that everything was so normal.349 She felt betrayed again, this time more

devastatingly, by the common people and the middle class, by their apathies and

insensitivities, by the fact that nothing had changed and yet people were seemingly

perfectly happy with their circumstances. But these aspects did not discourage her

from working again towards a socialist society, writing about the poor and the

vulnerable, and making people aware of the pressing social and economic conditions

plaguing the society. So, when a confused Sujata asks, ‘but haven’t things quietened

down’ now? Nandini becomes furious and replies, ‘Nothing has quietened down, it

can’t! [...] you of all persons should never say or believe that all is quiet now. Where

does such complacency come from?’350 Devi suggests that the bourgeois tends to

identify every form of protest (except its own) as disorder, and wants to always

‘quieten down’ things. Sujata tries to separate herself from this, but is deeply

implicated in the scheme of things. The uncertainty in her asking whether things have

quietened down comes from her punctuated, bridled vision of life, of the everyday

space she traverses, of the ideology she inculcates, and of the class position she enjoys.

Sujata’s everyday grief is as much a gendered rebellion against the politics of

establishment in her family, as it is a result of the conditions of her gendered social

346 Ibid, p. 194. 347 Ibid, p. 191, p. 194. 348 Devi, Mother, p. 73. 349 She shouts at Sujata and says, ‘All that you people find normal, I find abnormal’, Ibid, p. 87. 350 Ibid, pp. 85-86.

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position. This is why the novel ends on an ambiguous note. After her loud cry, Sujata

falls unconscious, and Devi adds, ‘Dibyanath screamed. The appendix has burst!’351

This sentence powerfully projects Devi’s corrosive irony at Dibyanath’s covering up

of his wife’s pain. The patriarchal orientation of the society will continue to not engage

with social and gender problems, and to distort meaning and emotions through its

class-filtered and limited understanding – the limitation and privileges against which

the Naxalite youth like Brati rebelled. However, as we have noted, Devi also gives us

the indication that Somu’s mother and Nandini have motivated Sujata enough to rebel

in her own way. At the end of each meeting, Sujata feels that this is probably the last

time she is meeting with these people, suggesting that she has gathered enough

affective and informative knowledge about Brati’s politics and the reason behind his

murder to stand up against her family’s patriarchal injunctions and potentially against

state violence. The possible vanishing of Somu’s mother and Nandini from her life is

the beginning of her career as a rebel. Sujata’s rebellion is thus an indication of female

solidarity and an act of political inspiration and transmission of female power. This is

what Govind Nihlani’s film adaptation of the novel (1998) holds when it shows in the

end that Sujata has become an NGO activist, working with Nandini to help the poor,

and that Dibyanath also assists them.352 Through the use of non-linear action time and

linear plot development, Devi’s narration then offers a compelling case of affective

politicisation and of the gendered resistance practice of the period. Recently, a number

of critics have begun to reconstruct the gendered dimension of the Naxalbari

movement, which has mostly been portrayed in academic discourses as a hyper-

masculine event orchestrated by urban male youth, mostly ‘brilliant’,353 despite

351 Ibid, p. 127. 352 Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa, dir. by Govind Nihlani (Udbhav Productions, 1998). In Devi’s novel

however, it is impossible to imagine Dibyanath playing such a role. This is a revision of Devi’s novel

and a suggestion of what gender politics might achieve. For a broader gender-based comparative study,

one can consult the character of the old widow Drabomoyi in Nirmal Chattopadhyay’s story ‘Pipasa’,

who resembles Somu’s mother. Draupadi in Devi’s story ‘Draupadi’ is a strong match for Nandini’s

courage and strength. Sujata’s character shares many similarities with the mother of the murdered

Naxalite Badal in Samaresh Basu’s short story ‘Shahider Maa’, with Nirupama in Pradip Mitra’s story

‘Samay-Asamay’, and more recently with Sujata in Arundhati Mukhopadhyay’s story

‘Samudrasakhshi’. Unfortunately, much of the creative Naxalite literature remains untranslated in

English, for a reader versed in Bangla the field is rich, and she or he can begin the task of recuperating

the role of gender and the highly complex nature of gender portrayal in the creative literature of the

Naxalite period from these different works. 353 See Dasgupta, pp. 94-95; Banerjee, p. 52; for a complex sociological understanding on this, see

Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and their Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 52-81;

for a critique on such a representation, see Mallarika Sinha Roy, Gender and Radical Politics in India:

Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967-1975) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 23-28.

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women playing a significant part.354 These critics have recuperated the important role

creative literature plays in the project of reconstruction.355 Devi’s powerful rendering

of the lives of a fighting Naxalite woman, an enduring and impoverished mother, and

a politicised bourgeois woman appears to be an excellent example for this project.

If dream and dialogues affectively and critically politicise Sujata, in

Operation? – Bashai Tudu memory is used politically to explore the relations between

caste, law, and Left polities in a postcolonial rural society. The one-day narrative,

unlike Mother, does not have a neat diurnal division of time, though there is still a

fairly coherent development of plot. The narration is divided into thirteen parts. The

first four parts are about the scary news (for the police and the local political party

members) that Bashai has been seen in action again. As Kali begins his journey on a

night, the narrative from the fifth part onwards adopts the memory mode – of the first

time Kali came to these jungles to talk to Bashai in 1970 when Bashai decided to

become a revolutionary. The next seven parts, from the fifth to the eleventh, are about

Bashai’s four ‘operations’ (murders) of four jotedars and his own four deaths by the

police and the army. This is an extension of Kali’s memories and appears partly as

omniscient narration. The final two parts are again in the current time: dawn has

broken and Kali has found the cave where Bashai was supposed to be after a fight with

the police. But there is no Bashai, only syringes, blood-stained bandages, medicines,

etc. A tired Kali falls asleep as ‘a small battalion entered the forest and moved with

inhuman uncanny skill toward where Kali slept. There feet tramping on the wet earth

moved silently’.356 The narration ends, like Mother, on an ambiguous note: that Bashai

might have left the cave and that Kali might just be killed. The ambiguity here suggests

that repressive and ideological power structures will continue to be powerful. At the

same time, Devi’s narration of subaltern resistance and representation of the

misreadings of the underprivileged convey a deep sense of faith in and support for

354 See Srila Roy, Remembering; Mallarika Sinha Roy, Magic Moments. 355 As sociologist Mallarika Sinha Roy writes, ‘Creative literature is not merely useful for filling the

gaps of academic history with imaginative history but provides new insights to read the movement from

the perspective of gender relations and sexual politics’ (p. 46). She adds that writing a ‘compensatory’

history of gender in the Naxalbari movement would be meaningless if gender is understood as the

structures of differential sexual power-relations and their historical and systematic implementations. In

place of a vaguely existing archival resource on women and gender relations, she proposes the use of

‘imaginary memory’, where archival and cultural memories, interviews, memoirs, and creative

literature could be exploited to understand the practices and loopholes of gender in the movement. See

Sinha Roy, Magic Moments, pp. 9-12, pp. 36-46. 356 Ibid, p. 148.

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resistant practices and ideologies.357 Kali’s memory plays two roles. First, it is used to

linearly develop the character of Bashai as a strong, intelligent, sincere, and

sympathetic human being, and that of Kali as a deeply loyal and honest Party cadre

whose views are always disregarded and whose sincerity is exploited by opportunist

Party members. He is sensitive to Bashai and listens to the tribal subaltern patiently.

Second, through the memory-based informed debates and dialogues, the narration

sometimes also enters astute sociological/statistical readings of law in the postcolonial

rural societies. In these expertly analytical passages, Kali’s memories no longer seem

to belong to his only, but are expanded to accommodate the narrator’s critical

evaluation of the living conditions in the peripheries of India.

Asked why he chose to become a revolutionary rather than the loyal Party

member he had been previously, Bashai tells Kali about the Party’s neglect of the

pressing issues of caste hierarchy and minimum wage. Despite having worked for the

party with full commitment, neither have Bashai’s political views and opinions been

taken into consideration (his tribal and low-caste background have often been made

clear to him358), nor has he been promoted in party rank or given a political portfolio.

Answering Kali’s question that he should forget the past and his narrow social-

identity-based politics and re-join the Party rather than resort to armed struggle, Bashai

says, ‘How can you make a Santal forget that he is a Santal? You are yet to know your

country, your people. Can you give us a country where the Party comrades at least will

not make distinctions between Santal comrades, Kaora comrades, and comrades from

the upper castes?’359 Kali remains silent, because there is no answer to this question.

He knows that the Party has become a bastion of middle-class and jotedari interests,360

and that people like him who still want to follow the principles of socialist and

Communist politics are derided within the Party, silenced, and made into expendable

figures. Although the jotedars evicted the tenant-peasants fearing that the CPI (M)-led

United Front Government would bring horrible prospects, it appears that in 1977, ten

years from the Naxalbari Movement, the jotedars have now comfortably shifted to

357 Here Devi’s strategy reminds us of Frank Kermode’s notion that endings in fiction can give us

crucial insights on the process of meaning-making in life. See Kermode, The Sense of an Ending:

Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 358 As he says to Kali: ‘At Samanta babu’s house, didn’t I see you [Kali] and your class served tea in

chinaware cups, and an earthen cup for me?’ Devi, Bashai, p. 24. 359 Ibid, p. 25. 360 Ibid, p. 31: ‘The class loyalties of the professed believers in a classless society were no less strong

than those of the bigoted’.

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Left politics and are ruling the Left organisations on their caste- and class-based

interests. Kali remembers Bashai telling him in another meeting that the

agriculturalists have always supported the Kishan Sabha and other Communist fronts

or the middle and small peasantry during their protests, especially during the Tebhaga

Movement, ‘[b]ut the Communist peasants’ front never upheld the rights of the

agricultural labourers. Can you tell me why, Kali-babu? Why? Wasn’t it because the

middle peasantry remains the mainstay of the Communist Kishan Sabha?’361 This

middle peasantry, constituted of the jotedars and the mahajans, of people like Nakul-

babu, Samanta-babu, etc., have been reaping the profits, using the Party to promote

their land- and class-based interests. Here Bashai tells Kali that these people have been

holding power since the pre-independence era, that the jotedar’s rule and exploitation

of the sharecroppers and landless peasantry dates back to the early twentieth century,

and that Kishan Sabha, which should have been the voice of the small peasantry, has

betrayed their interests time and again, especially in the context of minimum wage.362

Thus, when Kali says that this is the failure of the leadership, Bashai knows too well

of the bhadralok (upper-caste and upper-class) nature of Left politics and gives an

insightful response:

Oh, no. The leadership was fine. They did the right thing. For who were the

leaders after all? The bhadralok babus. They were concerned with the interests

of the bhadralok babus. Kali-babu, it is only the babus who have been leaders

all along, for it is the babu leaders alone who’d uphold the rights and interests

of the bhadraloks, the rich peasantry, and the middle peasantry.363

These lines remind us of Chakraborty’s novel Ākāler Sandhāne, where the

postcolonial rural society was shown to be dominated by bhadralok babu politics. But

unlike in Chakraborty’s novel where lower-caste people like Poran and Durga

continue to be exploited by the upper-caste babus, Bashai and his fellow comrades,

who are politically educated, and are not Naxalites, have decided to take up arms

against the Party leaders and their class-/caste-based politics: ‘Let me begin, Kali-

babu. I’m thinking of a new strategy. It’s new because it’s old’.364 The strategy is

361 Ibid, p. 29. 362 Ibid, pp. 45-48. 363 Ibid, pp. 34-35; in the translation, Devi’s English words were emphasised to make it clear for the

translated version. 364 Ibid, p. 22.

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guerrilla warfare, but Devi clearly indicates that this warfare is not a unique import

from Maoist China or derived from the theories of urban intellectuals. Peasants have

often resorted to armed struggle in Indian history. Bashai here refers to historical

events such as the Santhal rebellion and the Munda rebellion. As the narrator states

later, these histories of courageous resistance are either accorded little attention in

mainstream history writings, or are co-opted within a nationalist liberation narrative.

These acts do not however invalidate peasant insurgency, nor does it erase the use of

armed struggle in peasant resistance from their cultural memory (which remains

etched through songs and other folk cultural practices).365 Bashai and his comrades

took up arms because they could not tolerate jotedar exploitation any further, because

they knew that despite words of support and assistance, the Party leaders would be

taking care primarily of the interests of their class, because there had never been a

leader from the lower class or caste. Bashai categorically points out the social location

of the babus: ‘The babus are a caste by themselves, like the bagdis, and the Kaoras,

yes, a caste. And that’s why such a good man like you have to take stand with the

babus only because you are a babu yourself. And then in the party circle you would

give us lectures on the class struggle. No, Kali-babu you will never convince me’.366

Through the nature of these dialogues and such pointed retorts, Devi shows Bashai’s

deep awareness of social conditions and party principles, and suggests that an

uncritical, unstudied importation of the tenets of Marxism implemented in a

postcolonial society is not going to help the analysis or the overcoming of

contemporary socio-economic problems. These lines spoken through Kali’s

consciousness show the narrator’s, and consequently Devi’s, astute readings of the

political-economic character of Indian society. ‘A law that taught you to forget the

lower rung with every rung you rose on the ladder. Rise-a-rung-forget-the-lower-rung

was a single law of climbing that persisted in every field of Indian experience, in

religion, politics, business, education, culture, and personal life. This was the Indian

tradition’.367 Through these dialogues, developed linearly, Devi’s fictional rendering

365 Devi uses them throughout her tribal fiction. For a comparative study, see Chotti Munda and his

Arrow, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Malden: Blackwell, 2003). 366 Devi, Bashai, p. 24. 367 Ibid, p. 31; for an account of the history of the Indian Left, see Praful Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment.

Marx’s eurocentrism and the Indian Left’s reluctance to engage with caste issues have been matters of

long debate within the Indian Marxist historiography, which gave birth in the early eighties to the

widely influential neo-Marxist Subalternist school of history writing. In this context, see Guha,

Elementary Aspects of Peasants in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Partha

Chatterjee, Nationalist Though in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986);

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of the peasant insurgency appears to give voice to Bashai, the subaltern. Without

giving Bashai a chance to speak, Devi knows, the Naxalite or tribal resistance would

continue to remain a victim of critical misreading and administrative injustice. As I

will show, Bashai appears not only a politically conscious subaltern here, aware of his

rights and duties, but also a ‘subaltern’ in the more definitive military sense, who is

ready to fight his superior if the brutal and historical nature of the injustice inflicted

on the tribals is not stopped.

The non-linearity of action time is also executed through the device of

memory, which gives the writing an expert/academic style and allows Devi to use

fiction as a tool for social investigation. After the dialogues between Kali and Bashai,

from the seventh section onwards, the narrative is composed of Kali’s memories of

Bashai’s four jotedar-killing ‘operations’. The narrative begins with the fact that Kali

can still remember Bashai’s Banari operation, and from the fifth part onwards the

narrative is spoken by an omniscient narrator who historicises the occasion by telling

us how the jotedar Pratap Goldar has been exploiting bonded and landless labourers

by not paying them their shared crops or their minimum wage. Bashai teaches the

labourers about their rights, requests Goldar to pay them their dues without trouble,

and after being refused and forced to fight, kills him. In describing Bashai’s remaining

three operations, Devi historicises the conditions of the peasantry under jotedar and

mahajan rule, and describes in detail various subaltern acts of resistance. In these

descriptions, the omniscient narration is often interspersed with historical/bureaucratic

idioms of reporting/recording, where policy reports or excerpts from research papers

crowd the narrative. In the middle of the Banari operation, for instance, the narrator

states, ‘Before we begin our account of Operation Banari it would only be proper to

put on record that the agricultural labourers of Banari had not told that deputy Labour

Commissioner the whole truth when he had come in inquiry’.368 This is then followed

by a summary of the inquiry commission reports on minimum wage. The explanations

often borrow from existing political-economic reports and policies where the language

Dipesh Chakraborty, Provincializing Europe. For a critique of the subalternist school of history writing

and its uncritical use of Marx and capitalism, see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre

of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). For a wider reading on this, see August Nimtz, ‘The Eurocentric

Marx and Engels and Other Related Myths’, in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, ed. by

Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 65-80; and

Kolja Lindner, ‘Marx’s’ Eurocentrism: Postcolonial Studies and Marx Scholarship’, Radical

Philosophy, 161 (2010), pp. 27-42. 368 Devi, Bashai, p. 65.

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becomes sophisticated and technical: ‘the last notification in 1974 had related the wage

rate to the consumer price index for the agricultural labour and noted “The minimum

rate for wages as revised above are on the basis of the Agricultural Consumer Price

Index (60-61=100) for 1972-3 at 233 points”’.369 The narration continues in this vein:

‘It should be noted at this point that there was a mistake in the notification’, and goes

on to describe the mistake and analyse how the minimum wage reports have put it

wrong and have been cheating the agricultural labourers for decades. This is clearly a

commentary by the narrator, even though it is supposed to be part of Kali’s memories.

The next section then begins, ‘Kali Santra was called back to the immediate present at

the sound of a cautious scraping outside’.370 Hence, the suggestion is that Kali has

started thinking about these incidents and fallen asleep when the narrator breaks in

and supplies a more accurate, historical, and dramatised rendering of the events, which

includes reasoning out data, fractions, policy reports, etc. Reminding us of the novel’s

preface where Devi elucidates and pinpoints the socio-economic conditions in the

periphery as one of the reasons for the movement using quantitative and data-based

historical knowledge, the use of these quantitative data and policy reports here

suggests the narrator’s analytical skill and political acumen.371 Although there are a

number of precedents on the technique of juxtaposing the ‘expert’ narrator and the

‘subaltern’ character, where the ‘expert’ narrator’s ‘facts’ are tested through the prism

of the subaltern character’s experience – such as Multatuli’s Max Havelaar (1860) and

J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip (1978), to name just a couple from the last two

centuries372 – what is unique in Devi is the specifics of caste and tribe in India. The

narrator is using data and calculations to present the wide gap between state policies

for the Adivasis and their implementation. Alessandra Marino argues that Devi uses

369 Ibid, p. 121. 370 Ibid, p. 83. 371 Consider, for instance, this passage from the ‘Preface’: ‘The long history of the peasant insurgency

in India (where the landless peasantry number nearly fifty million and constitute 26.33 per cent of the

country’s total labour force) has shown up time and again the nature of exploitation that has been the

fate of the peasants. […] The local jotedars have exploited them for ages under a sharecropping system

that enabled them to provide the landless peasants with seeds, ploughs and plough cattle, some food

with little money, and to appropriate the major share of the harvest. […] The planters (jotedars) evicted

the ādhiārs (sharecroppers) by force and set their elephants to raze their huts to the ground. The peasants

of Naxalbari mobilized against such persecution and exploitation and rose in an insurrection that

inspired the deprived and exploited peasantry in the neighbouring states of Andhra [sic], Kerala,

Tamilnadu [sic], Bihar and Orissa’. Mahasweta Devi, ‘Author’s Preface to the Present Edition’, in

Bashai Tudu, pp. xv-xvi. 372 Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, trans. by Roy

Edwards (London: Penguin, 1987); J. G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip (London: Flamingo, 1984).

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this style to make us, (bourgeois) readers, aware of the problems of law and citizenship

for the tribal people in postcolonial India.373 Through constantly engaging with legal

and political problems in the postcolonial peripheries of India, Devi, Marino says,

throws at us the uneasy question:

What is the meaning of democracy if its very system remains inaccessible to

the majority of poor citizens? The preservation of feudalist power dynamics

empties the nation of its promises of freedom and development for all.

Independence is meaningless without the achievement of basic rights for

agricultural workers, for whom the new laws and the constitution may prove

to be meaningless.374

Devi’s critique, I agree with Marino here, builds from her understanding that

modernisation and development, which have brought forth ‘modernity’ in India, have

also systematically cornered and destroyed the Adivasi world. The postcolonial

society, which has ironically extended colonialism’s modernising drives, has

continued to view the Adivasis as criminals and illegal nomads. The thrust of Devi’s

narrative is thus a challenge as much to the dominant political logic as it is to the

bourgeois realist lens. However, I read such a historically-conscious realist aesthetics

not as ‘oppositional modernism’,375 as Marino does, but as critical irrealism. Devi’s

irrealism emerges from her act of giving voice to the peripheral and subaltern

characters and making them interventional into the bourgeois realist world. Her

characters realise the problems within the existing dominant framework and try to

break open or confront the framework. They subvert bourgeois philosophy and

bourgeois political life. Devi’s fiction is derived from her close familiarity with tribal

experience. She has been critical of the postcolonial state because she can see through

its lies and its neo-colonial character; it is only at its peripheries that the true (evil)

character of the state is revealed. She wants to highlight the conditions of state

deprivation, discrimination, and violence in the periphery, and thus fractures the

373 Alessandra Marino, Acts of Angry Writing: On Orientalism and Citizenship in Postcolonial India

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015). 374 Ibid, p. 48. 375 Ibid, p. 68; another scholar Sophie McCall thinks that Devi’ documentary fiction, in its interesting

combination of history, myth, and journalism, provides crucial insights on the current state of debt-

bondage, sex trade, and migration patterns of tribal women in postcolonial India. Though Devi is an

exciting writer in engaging with social scientific investigation, McCall is also aware of the challenges

of the politics of translation and interpretation of Devi’s works. See McCall, ‘Mahasweta Devi’s

Documentary Fiction as Critical Antidote: Rethinking Bonded Labour, “Women and Development”

and Sex Trade in India’, Resources for Feminist Research, 29.3/4 (2002), 39-58.

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omniscient sequential realist narration to accord the peripheral voice, and the strength

and ability to speak. She also shows how the characters engage in active participation

with one another. In the case of Sujata, it is Somu’s mother and Nandini who debate

with her, affectively politicise her, and make her aware of the problems of the deeply

consumerist-patriarchal nature of life in the postcolonial urban sphere. In the case of

Bashai, it is Kali who listens, argues, and ponders. With him, we too are led to ponder

about the current conditions in Indian rural societies. Her irrealism is a political choice

through which she attempts to tell us as much about the catastrophic effects of

modernisation and development, of living in the margins as and with the subaltern, as

it is about the difficulty of narrating a story about these issues. I will substantiate my

points on critical irrealism through a brief discussion of how the quest mode has been

used here.

Quest as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us is ‘a search or pursuit in order

to find something’, an ‘inquiry’.376 In the Middle Ages, when quest romances were

popular, the quest would mean completing hard tasks, fulfilling chivalric duties and

tests of constancy and chastity. As Tim Young writes, ‘The protagonist embarks on a

mission, encounters impediments, removes them (more often than not), attains his or

her goal and sets out on the return voyage, having increased his or her (usually his)

own worth through the successful completion of the objective’.377 In the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century, Grail quest romances were revived mainly in

France.378 Jonathan Ullyot finds that this revival influenced the Irish Literary Revival

and modernist interest in the Middle Ages.379 Ullyot, who writes on the European

modernist failed quest narratives to which we will return soon, thinks that one of the

main reasons behind the modernist popularity of the Grail quest romances lay in their

emphatic depiction of success through adventure. In a quest narrative, there is a strong

presumption about acquiring a certain object, although the path of acquisition is beset

with improbable, unpredictable difficulties. In our discussion so far, we have found

that Devi uses her protagonists to psychologically explore the reasons of the murder

376 ‘Quest’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, University of Warwick Library Database <http://0-

www.oed.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/> [accessed 16 Jan, 2017]. 377 Tim Young, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2013) p. 88. 378 See Janine Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature: 1851–1900 (London: Oxford University

Press, 1973). 379 Jonathan Ullyot, The Medieval Presence in Modernist Literature: The Quest to Fail (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 10.

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and the re-appearance of Brati and Bashai through memory and dreams, and to

undertake physical journeys to investigate, understand, and uncover the larger

historical issues involved in individual struggles. I will read these psycho-physical

explorations as quests. The use of the quest here is interesting and different in several

ways. The quester is in search of someone whom he or she either does not know or

knows very little. The path also appears to be clearer: Neither Sujata nor Kali has to

face anything physically challenging in their quests save their own conflicts, anxieties,

and traumas. Sujata knows whom she has to meet and how to meet them, in the same

way as Kali knows how to find Bashai in the jungle or the medium, Betul Kaora, who

can help him out in his journey. But the object of the quest has no static meaning or

fixed location. Both Brati and Bashai are incomprehensible for the questers, and the

quests are as much about finding them or finding out the reasons for their deaths as

they are about understanding what the quested objects stand for. As Sujata talks to

Somu’s mother and Nandini, new facets of Brati’s life are unfolded, and she comes to

know of the ideology that Brati believed in and how it was crushed by the

representatives of state machinery such as the inspector Saroj Pal.380 Kali Santra’s

quest unravels Bashai’s story, his reasons behind taking up armed struggles, and the

current condition of Left politics. However, as has been noted, Kali hardly understands

Bashai or his politics because, as Bashai repeatedly makes it clear, as a babu, it is a

historically and epistemologically complex task for Kali to understand a Santhal.

Sujata also says on numerous occasions that she hardly understood Brati and has failed

as a mother, which, according to Nandini, is partly due to her class location and class-

shaped everyday life. Kali fails in his quest to find Bashai and locates instead a

bloodied bandage, a syringe, cotton, etc., indicating that Bashai is probably wounded

but still alive. In both contexts then, the quest seems to have failed. It is doubtful

whether they have fulfilled their tasks of locating their supposed targets. It is also

doubtful, from the novels’ ambiguous endings, whether the knowledge they have

gained about their own characters, prejudices, and assumptions in the course of the

quest will transform their characters. Failed quests are characteristic of modernist

writing. Ullyot tells us that European modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Franz

Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and others have all used the failed quest format and its

380 Quest here takes the meaning of inquest or inquiry. Since the police and her family have decided not

to speak about Brati, Sujata takes the inquiry upon her.

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structural incoherence in order to indicate the existence of a bitter, cynical, and

suspecting post-war society where hope, optimism, and success appear only as

illusions. For Ullyot, these writers were theoretically committed to the notion of

failure, as opposed to success in quest formats, which they presented through the

stylistic challenges in the texts: ‘After all, the modernist narrative committed to failure

simply fails – it fails to tell a complete or coherent story, it defers its outcome, it

collapses into fragments or ends abruptly, it gets side-tracked or reaches a deadlock,

it fails to present a coherent idea even of why it fails, and the narrator or implied author

seems to fall prey to the despair or confusion of his protagonist’.381 They have

presented ‘a repetitive, fragmented, and nonlinear text that privileges moments of

paradox, confusion, anxiety, and breakdown over moments of revelation, discovery,

coherence, and resolution’.382 Ullyot is right about the failed quest aspect in modernist

writing and the structural improvisations, but neither Kafka, Beckett, nor, for that

matter, Devi, I think, fails to write a coherent narrative or ‘fails to present a coherent

idea even of why it fails’. Devi does use the failed quest narrative to indicate that it is

difficult for members of the elite classes to understand the material conditions and

emancipatory struggles of the peripheral, Naxalite, Santhal characters, but she uses a

very coherent, purposeful narrative. The stories discussed in this chapter may not

display complete closures, but, as I have shown, they do have their plot development,

suspense, climax, and sustained engagement with an immediate historical social

reality. While for Ullyot, the stylistic aspects of failed quest narratives challenge any

possibility of realist writing, for Devi, narrative incommensurability and social reality

appear to be intricately related. The structural and formal peculiarities are a way to

represent peripheral history, to expose the structural logic of oppressions in the

periphery, and to realistically present the issues involved. These elements remind us

of the definition that Benita Parry gives of modernist writings in peripheral,

postcolonial societies.383 Taking from the world-systems theory of Immanuel

Wallerstein, Giovani Arrighi, Samir Amin and others, and from Franco Moretti’s

formulation of a ‘one and unequal world-system’ where core, peripheral, and semi-

peripheral societies are coerced into the capitalist mode of production ‘in a relationship

381 Ullyot, Medieval, p. 5. 382 Ibid, p. 1. 383 Benita Parry, ‘Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms’, ARIEL: A Review of International English

Literature, 40.1 (2009), 27-55.

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of growing inequality,’ Parry argues that there might be affinities found culturally

between the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions, from the once-colonised countries

to regions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, in their

‘incongruous overlapping of social realities and experiences from radically different

historical moments’.384 These cultural affinities, resulting from different societies’

mode of insertion into capitalist modernity, are most visibly found in the use of

stylistic irregularities in literature, especially in novels, and constitute irrealism in the

periphery. Parry also borrows from Michael Löwy to conceptualise peripheral

(ir)realism, which, for her, is marked by the odd juxtaposition of ‘the mundane and

the fantastic, the recognizable and the improbable, the seasonal and the eccentric, the

earthborn and the fabulous, the legible and the oneiric, historically inflected and

mystical states of consciousness’.385 The stylistic irregularities of the failed quest, and

the social and historical aspects attached to it, can be understood along the lines of

Parry’s reading of irrealism. But I also think the word ‘critical’ in critical irrealism,

which Parry does not use in her theorisation, is crucial here for Devi and Bhattacharya.

Not only do these writers implicate the problems of linearity and regularity in

peripheral narration, they also use the narrator influentially to comment on social

issues and dominant injunctions. The rest of the discussion on Devi’s quest mode and

critical irrealism will focus on her use of the forceful narrator and recurrent trope of

the absent presence of the Naxalite character or the tribal insurgent.

The Interventionist Narrator and the Non-Death of the Insurgent

The interventionist and critical aspect of Devi’s irrealism is presented most

prominently through the castigating, ironic voice of the narrator. Reminding us of

Lukács’ concept of realist ‘narration’ as participation in the narrative,386 Devi’s

384 Ibid, p. 30. 385 Ibid, p. 39. 386 In the essay, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, Lukács makes a distinction between realist and naturalist art.

Realist novelists such as Balzac, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Scott, and others use narration taking the

‘standpoint of a participant’, while naturalists like Zola and Flaubert use ‘description’, ‘the standpoint

of an observer’ (p. 111). While he finds the realist writers actively involved in the socio-economic

practices of their times and trying to eke out the struggle between man and the social conflicts in the

protagonists, making use of descriptions of inanimate objects interlinked with the main events of the

narrative, the naturalists, writing in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution in France, appear to react to

capitalist dehumanisation mainly through the mode of observations; their criticism of the society and

culture becomes their mode of participation, which is an isolated, clinical, still-life description. Lukács

thus posits that the absence of participation or narration in naturalist art is mainly the absence of

humanistic ideology (p. 143). See ‘Narrate and Describe?’, in Writer and Critic, pp. 110-48.

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narrator often enters her protagonists’ minds, extending the capacity or the limit of

their consciousness and exposing the underlying structures or the forces that control

the societies concerned. But unlike Tolstoy or Balzac who, Lukács found, were located

in and reacting to the transitional period of crises (their countries’ socio-economic

transition to capitalism), Devi is situated within the conjuncture of historical crisis,

where the apparatuses of colonialism, capitalism, and the democratic postcolonial

state combine to inflict caste, class, and gender atrocities on the peripheral postcolonial

subject on an everyday basis, where the agitations by women, peasants, the urban poor,

or lower-caste people are deemed anti-state and are brutally crushed, and where civil

society appears to be more sensitive to the violation of human rights in Vietnam,

Bangladesh, and other countries than in the immediate context in Bengal. Devi’s

narrator thus uses the realist property of ‘narration’, but her intervention is forceful,

energetic, and ruthless. Consider this section from Mother of 1084:

There is no longer any unrest or panic. No shop or market suddenly pulling

down shutters, no doors to houses being slammed shut […] no black cars,

helmeted policemen and gun-toting soldiers pursue some desperate lone young

boy. Nor does one see bodies tied by rope to the wheels of police vans, still

alive, being dragged and slammed against the asphalt […] Happy and peaceful

households are back.387

This passage appears in the beginning of the ‘Noon’ section where Sujata visits

Somu’s house in the refugee colony. The narrator describes the material conditions of

the colony, recalls the bloody scenes of violence there during the movement, and then

adds that there is nothing to fear anymore, that everything has become calm and

composed. Note the trenchant irony in the words ‘happy and peaceful’. The graphic

descriptions of horror, the bodies being tied to the wheels of police vans, and so on,

heighten the irony here. The middle class did not come out to help these youths who

dreamt about the end of class domination and structural oppression; instead, it

demanded happiness and peace at the cost of ruthless annihilation of young people –

the same happiness that makes Nandini virulent with anger and disgusted at the

shamelessness and betrayal of the middle class. At the same time, by describing the

‘calm’ in terms of what was there just yesterday or the other day, Devi proposes that

the spectre or ghost of that recent violence continues to haunt the ‘calm’, which

387 Devi, Mother, p. 34.

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therefore becomes just a surface reality, papered over something horrible and very

different. The use of irony in the narrator’s commentary becomes more scathing,

sarcastic, and direct in the evaluation of the role of civil society during the period:

Exactly a year and three months later, the writers, artists and intellectuals

turned West Bengal upside down out of sympathy with and support for the

cause of Bangladesh. Surely they must have been thinking the right thoughts,

and mothers like Sujata must have been on the wrong track altogether [...]

Since they could ignore the daily orgy of blood that stained Calcutta and

concentrate on the brutal ceremony of death beyond the border, their vision

must have been flawless. Sujata’s vision was surely wrong. The poets, writers,

intellectuals and artists are honoured members of society, recognized

spokesmen for the country at large.388

One cannot fail to notice the bitter tone and the pointed criticism here. The middle

class is not concerned about police violence against the Naxalite youth. The poets and

intellectuals who are the conscience keepers of their societies have decided to ignore

the phenomenon, the everyday bloodbath, and to show their support for the

Bangladesh liberation war. Devi has pointed this out in her preface to Bashai Tudu:

‘the hired writers pandering to the middle and upper classes content themselves with

weaving narcissistic fantasies in the name of literature’.389 They do not care to pay

heed to the current and immediate context. She represents this aspect through the

character of the poet Dhiman Ray in Mother of 1084, who writes revolutionary

Naxalite poetry to charm his upper-class (female) audience in big affluent parties.390

This also reminds us of what the literary critics Nirmal Ghosh and Phatik Chand Ghosh

have found in their evaluation of popular Naxalite literature – the Naxalite as a

romantic youth excessively suffering from idealism. The writers and artists followed

suit and reaped commercial benefit from this. Through this passage, Devi thus points

a finger at the irresponsible actions taken by the civil society, the critical thinkers, and

the ‘honoured members of society’. But Devi does not only criticise these actions, she

also points the way towards resolution. Her narrative tone shifts from sarcasm and

irony to pity and concern at the question of how to represent the Naxalite, or the

peripheral Santhal insurgent whose voice the state and the mainstream media have

388 Ibid, pp. 50-51. 389 Devi, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. xvii. 390 Devi, Mother, p. 116.

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long put down or are not ready to hear; the question of how to listen to them and

engage with their problems meaningfully. This passage from Bashai Tudu is a telling

example of such concern:

But one would lose Bashai if one refused to listen to what he had to say or

didn’t care to understand what he said. And then without having understood

him, when one tried to present him conveniently for the records as something

different from what he really was, who would be the loser? Bashai Tudu? Or

the new interpreters? Where were the research analysts of the future who

would salvage the truth from the mountains of untruths and set the records

straight? There were too many truths in the world distorted into lies in the

records through the conspiracy of the administration. Isn’t there daily

assassination of truths going on continuously?391

The narrator clearly suggests that no one is ready to listen to the tribal voice with

sympathy. The researcher, the analyst, or the journalist, who goes from the ‘mainland’

of India to listen to the problems of the Adivasis in the peripheral regions, collects

their data for sociological analysis and leaves. They either do not understand the

demands of the tribal people or do not want to understand, as their interpretations are

predicated on analysis of quantitative data, so that sympathy and love for the Adivasis

never enter the frame. As Devi tells Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her interview in

Imaginary Maps: ‘The tribal and the mainstream have always been parallel. There has

never been a meeting point. The mainstream simply does not understand the

parallel’.392 This is what Devi has been trying to show through her writings and

activism: her everyday living with the Adivasis, her journalism and pamphlets

exposing state atrocities or negligence, and her fictions highlighting the problem of

life and living in the periphery. She plays the role of a patient listener – the character

she finds lacking in the practical world of data collection for the government about the

Adivasis. Spivak writes in her commentary in Imaginary Maps that ‘we must learn to

learn from the original practical ecological philosophers of the world, through slow,

attentive, mind-changing (on both sides), ethical singularity that deserves the name of

“love” – to supplement necessary collective efforts to change laws, modes of

production, systems of education, and health care’.393 Devi contributes to this

391 Devi, Bashai, p. 41. 392 Spivak, Imaginary, p. x. 393 Ibid, pp. 200-01; emphasis in original.

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‘learning’ through her dual roles of activist and creative writer, teaching us how to

practise the relationship of ‘a witnessing love and a supplementing collective

struggle’.394 The term ethical singularity is vital in this context, but Spivak’s use here

appears confusing. Ethical singularity, Spivak writes, is the ‘secret encounter’ between

the (subaltern) leader and her or his respondent where what is not said is taken into

consideration responsibly through what has been said. But since ‘it is impossible for

all leaders (subaltern or otherwise) to engage every subaltern in this way, especially

across the gender divide’, ethics always becomes the ‘experience of the impossible’.395

She corroborates this point by saying that this impossibility ‘is not identical with the

frank and open exchange between radicals and the oppressed in times of crisis’.396 It

is never clear what Spivak means by the times of crisis here. Are they the time-periods

of upheavals, different from everyday struggles, when the subaltern’s singular voice

is collectively represented? If so, what is the nature of such crisis? Is this a sudden

crisis or has this been going on for centuries? It is also never clear when the subaltern

can have a frank exchange with the intellectual, or whether it is at all possible to know

that an open and frank exchange will have nothing secretive about it. I think a better

meaning of this crucial term ‘ethical singularity’ lies in the idea that intellectuals

should learn to become committed and ethical readers or auditors of the complex

subaltern/tribal social forms and ‘knowledges’, of the accumulated nature of gender

discrimination without attempting to fully ‘comprehend’ or ‘apprehend’ the tribal.

Where writings by other authors often propose the possibility of sympathetic

communication with the subaltern other (tribals, women, or tribal women), Devi asks

us to do something much more difficult – to maintain sympathy and solidarity by

accepting the failure in communicating with or understanding them. Her narrative is

thus geared towards this failure of communication, or incommensurability, while

attempting to generate, as in the case of Puran in his long short story ‘Pterodactyl’,

‘love, excruciating love’ for the wretched of the earth.397 But Devi also knows that this

element of love and care is largely missing from what the state agents and official

auditors did. Thus, her writings always feature a narrator who is either one of these

agent-characters, or a supporter of such characters but who criticises their lack of

394 Ibid, p. 201. 395 Ibid, p. xxv. 396 Ibid, p. xxv. 397 Devi, ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ in Imaginary Maps: Three Stories, trans. by Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 95-196.

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sympathy.398 As her narrator in Bashai Tudu puts it: ‘Where were the research analysts

of the future who would salvage the truth from the mountains of untruths and set the

records straight?’399 The binary opposite of the speaking subaltern and the

deaf/unsympathetic listener is what makes her narration so sharp, so critical, and

comparable to an act of journalistic and social activism. Devi’s role as a writer and

activist is thus situated in her powerful design of narrator, in her socially responsible

and ethical attempts at listening to the tribal’s problems and making us aware of them.

As Neil Lazarus writes in a reading of ‘Pterodactyl’, the ‘responsibility for

establishing this link (between sustainability of the human life and recovery of forms

of aboriginal sociality) lies not with those who have been displaced, dispossessed and

marginalised by “India” (local avatar of the “modern”), but with the likes of Puran

Sahay and, more generally, ourselves (her presumptive readers)’.400

This takes us to the final and probably the most obvious aspect of Devi’s

critical irrealist writing: the absence or non-death of the Naxalite/insurgent figure in

the narratives. These novels are about the absences of the Naxalite/insurgent figures

who have been made present through the thoughts and memories of their near and dear

ones. Properly speaking, the main protagonists of the novels analysed in this chapter

are Sujata and Kali; they are physically present in the narratives and it is through their

quests that the Naxalite/insurgent figures appear. However, it is Brati and Bashai that

these novels are truly about, and who take up most of the narrative space through

memory-narrations. Devi chooses her titles very skilfully. Mother of 1084 is a novel

about a mother, Sujata, but the reader is left to wonder what 1084 stands for. When it

is made clear that it is the number of Brati’s corpse, the focal point and the appeal of

the title seem to shift from the mother to the corpse. She is no longer the mother of a

human being, but of a dead body. When Brati was alive, he was enquiring and

visionary. He asked uncomfortable questions of the bourgeois order, pointed fingers

at the bitter truths and hidden guilt of the established society. Therefore, he was not

allowed to live in this ‘rotten’ world, had to be killed and reduced to a number. This

novel is about Brati’s life and political faith. But it is also about the number 1084.

398 Thus, not only do the narration and the role of the narrator become important in Devi, but the

abundance of characters such as journalists, food officers, clerks, accountants, in short the bureaucrats,

appears to be significant as well, especially in relation to postcolonial modernity and the periphery. 399 Devi, Bashai, p. 41. 400 Neil Lazarus, ‘Epilogue: The Pterodactyl of History?’, Textual Practice, 27.3 (2013), 523-36 (p.

528).

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Perhaps it is important here to add that although the narrator describes Brati as soft,

sincere, curious, and determined, Brati’s actual physical details are never

communicated to us. We read of the various scars on his chest, the clotting of cold and

dark red blood on his neck, and his mutilated face, from which, as the dom (carrier of

the deadbodies) at the morgue says, Sujata would not be able to identify him. Note the

passage here:

There were three bullet holes on his body, one on the chest, one on the stomach,

one on the throat. Blue holes. The bullets had been aimed upon close range.

The skin around the holes was blue. The cordite had left its burns. Chocolate-

coloured blood. The cordite had scaled the skin around the hole to leave it

parched and cracked into hollow rings […] Brati’s face battered and smashed

by the blunt edge of a sharp, heavy weapon. […] Sujata bent down to take a

closer look at the face. She would have liked to caress his pace with her fingers.

She would have liked to call him by his name, Brati, Brati, and run her fingers

over his face. But there was not an inch of skin left smooth and clear to bear

the touch of her fingers. It was all raw flesh, all battered and smashed’. 401

Not only is the face unidentifiable, Devi’s narration here, alternating between the

emotions of a suffering mother and an objective reporter-like narratorial voice, makes

the aspects of state torture and motherly pain strikingly poignant. There is no face left.

Sujata has to rather identify him through his birthmarks. There is a suggestion here

that the body may not be Brati’s. The corpse in the title of the novel carries this feeling

of absent presence. It could be argued that the novel is about 1084 and not about Brati,

son of Sujata. It is through the State’s dictates and a coercive approval from Brati’s

mother that 1084 becomes Brati. There is no doubt that Brati was killed in the police

encounter, and it is to show the brutality of police torture that Brati’s character has

been developed in a particular way. But this does not invalidate the idea that the corpse

could be anyone’s, that this is a novel about a corpse, about the reductive

transformation of life into corpses during the Naxalite period. It is a novel about a

number, about how some dreaming youths and their struggles were reduced to a matter

of numbering, of how they were inhumanly killed, dehumanised and quantified before

their corpses were set on fire. At the same time, if we think of Brati’s corpse as a kind

of ‘every corpse’ that testifies to state violence, the withholding of identity also

becomes a gesture of refusing the power that comes with this violence. That is,

401 Devi, Mother, p. 11.

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anonymity here enacts an oppositional possibility while testifying to accumulated state

power. The novel’s title, therefore, is bitterly critical of the state and its inhuman acts.

This anti-statist element is also present in the other novel, Operation? – Bashai

Tudu. The word ‘operation’ stands for ‘a strategic movement of troops, ships, etc., for

military action’.402 In this novel, ‘operation’ suggests Bashai’s various operations/acts

of jotedar-killing. That these acts require military discipline, training, and acumen are

amply indicated through Bashai’s successful guerilla operations, pointing also at the

fuller meaning of the term ‘subaltern’ in the peripheral context. At the same time, the

use of the word also has a predominant state-based meaning, especially if we

remember that there have also been four operations from the state, by the police and

the army, to kill Bashai. Indeed, the novel ends with another military operation for

him. A military operation is generally undertaken when the state considers a situation

a socio-political crisis and wants to quell it through repressive force. The element of

crisis is read in such a way that it becomes impossible to see the point from the other

way round. The mainland and the tribal, as Devi put it, are always parallel; there is no

understanding, no meeting point. In Bashai, Bashai is the crisis incarnate. The crisis

is that he does not die, despite being identified several times as having been killed. A

military operation is undertaken to confirm that Bashai, the peripheral, insurgent,

harmful element for the mainstream, is dead. We know from the conclusion that

Bashai will not be found and so there will have to be more operations. What is notable

here is the use of the interrogative mark after the word ‘operation’ in the title. Is Devi

unable to believe that there can be an entire military operation just to capture and kill

Bashai? Why does the state need an ‘operation’ for this? Consider also the novel’s

title in its entirety. Bashai is nowhere in the narrative, and, like Brati, he is also the

creation of Kali’s memories and could easily be the figment of his imagination. There

are things that Kali remembers of Bashai and there are things that the narrator tells us.

Bashai’s character is a creation of thoughts, memories, and possibilities. Nothing is

concrete here. Devi deliberately creates the transient, ephemeral figure of Bashai. Kali

and others recognise Bashai not through his body and face, which have been mutilated

by the police and army beyond recognition, but by the gesture of chocking the air

through his fingers. Consider the conversation between a tribal, Sodan from

402 ‘Operation’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, University of Warwick Library Database <http://0-

www.oed.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/> [accessed 16 Jan, 2017].

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Patalkundi who has been called to the Bakuli police station to identify Bashai’s corpse

after his ‘second’ death. The Superintendent of Police asks:

‘What are you saying?’

‘It’s Bashai Tudu.’

‘Whom did you identify then at the Jagula hospital last time? Eh?’

‘Bashai.’

‘What do you mean? Do you take it for a joke?’

‘No, babu, I am not joking. The one we saw last time didn’t have anything you

could call a face. The rest of the body looked like Bashai’s; so I said, it was

Bashai. The one you show us now has no face either, the body is riddled with

bullets. When our Bashai was in a rage, he would ring the neck of the air with

his two hands. He used to ring it and this one too did the same. Tell us, babu,

when there’s nothing that can be called a face, and the man was seen wringing

the neck of the air with his hands before his death, shouldn’t we say that it was

Bashai? 403

Again, the matter of state torture is poignantly presented. The mutilation of the face

suggests the hatred the state agents carry for the insurgents. It also indicates the violent

and coherent effort by the state to obliterate an insurgent’s identity and the possibilities

of his/her memorialisation. But also note the element of guessing and hypothesis in

the act of identification. As with Brati’s corpse, nobody knows for sure if this is the

corpse of Bashai. It is the signs and marks that ascribe meaning to the body or to the

concept that Bashai stands for. In Bashai’s case, it could also be argued that the tribal-

peasants have launched a uniform counter-strategy against state violence: if the state

mutilates an insurgent’s face, they can decide not to identify the insurgent. In this way,

the fear of the peripheral insurgent and of insurgency in general will continue to haunt

the state. The title, thus, in these two different readings of operation makes a dialectical

relation of state violence and tribal insurgency (also for Mother of motherly sympathy

and love, and of state cruelty).

This dialectical relation of reality and unreality in the postcolonial, peripheral

context is best understood in the episode where after a long talk with Bashai about

caste and babu leadership, Kali broods, ‘Bashai was now a strange continent. But a

403 Devi, Bashai, p. 112.

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continent that one could not attack, explore or colonize’.404 Just before these remarks,

Kali has repeated realisations that the Communist Party has become a system of

profiteering and power mongering.405 There are moments that Devi uses the words

‘Party’ and ‘Administration’ interchangeably to suggest that the Party is a giant

incomprehensible and mysterious Administrative system in the eyes of which Kali,406

Bashai,407 the local Sub Inspector in search of Bashai,408 and the agricultural

labourers409 are all ‘expendable,’ insignificant, and replaceable bodies, like cogs in a

machine. The system works mysteriously and can make anyone a sacrificial body –

which pushes Kali to think that this is an unreal world he lives in: ‘he was haunted by

a sense of unreality […] would it be wrong to deduce that the Party and the

Establishment had the same disdainful attitude towards the common cadres? But the

Party and Establishment were supposed to be antagonists’.410 This is not a unique

realisation for Kali. The institutionalisation of revolution in the aftermath of

decolonisation by the Marxist parties, and the sense of despair in politics and society

that it had created, can be found across postcolonial writings in the seventies and

eighties, in the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Ayi Kwei Armah, Meja Mwangi, Ngũgĩ wa

Thiong’o, Debo Kotun, Pepetela and others.411 Many of these writers, notably

Pepetela, render through ‘irrealist’ narratives the postcolonial society’s transition to a

market economy and the bourgeois politics of the Left.412 Devi is acutely conscious of

this transformation of the established Left, and tells us that Kali and a new government

collector find the world ‘Kafkaesque’.413 The reference to Kafka, which reminds us of

404 Devi, Bashai, p. 29. 405 Ibid, pp. 35-36. 406 Ibid, p. 37. 407 Ibid, p. 26. 408 Ibid, p. 11. 409 Ibid, p. 141. 410 Ibid, p. 37; italics in original. 411 The phrase, ‘institutionalization of revolution’ has a very long history, for instance in Mexico where

the ruling party after 1910 called itself the ‘Institutional Revolution Party’ (Partido Revolucionario

Institucional). Much Mexican and more generally Latin American literature in the 20th C has duly

criticised what Vargas Llosa, for one, called the ‘perfect dictatorship’ of the PRI. See the novels of

Carlos Fuentes, most notably, The Death of Artemio Cruz, trans. by Sam Hileman (London: Secker and

Warburg, 1977); for readings from postcolonial Africa, see Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones are

Not Yet Born (London: Heinemann, 1969); Meja Mwangi, Kill Me Quick (London: Heinemann, 1974);

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood (London: Heinemann, 1986); Debo Kotun, Abiku (California:

Nepotis, 1998). 411 See specifically Pepetela’s novel, The Return of the Water Spirit, trans. by Luís R Mitras (Oxford:

Heinemann, 2002).

413 Devi, Bashai, p. 97.

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the unreal world of bureaucracy and political power in The Trial or the mysterious

injunctions of law and torture in ‘In the Penal Colony’, not only makes a compelling

case for how administration as an abstract and rigorous system of decisions and

injunctions tortures the clueless human subject in the postcolonial world, but also

reminds us of the essentially unchanging nature and mechanisms of bureaucracy and

political parties (from Kafka’s imperialist Europe in the interwar years to the current

postcolonial conditions in Bengal).414 Against this haunted, incomprehensible, unreal

world of Party system and higher-caste-ruled administration, Bashai’s words and

actions appear to be small but potent acts of transgression and rebellion. The reference

above to Bashai as a ‘strange continent’ qualifies the long nature of colonialism: the

multiple cases of colonisation of the most ancient settlers in India, the tribal people;

by Hindu and Muslim leaders of various empires; by the colonial British who

implemented the Criminal Tribes Act, and the colonial native landlords for rents and

crops; and now by postcolonial India which exploits the peripheral tribal characters in

the name of modernisation and development, and has alienated and cornered them -

an aspect that many of Devi’s tribal fiction repeatedly brings up, most notably the long

short story ‘Pterodactyl’. But Bashai is beyond colonisation now as the administration

cannot catch him, as he dies only to come back again in arms, waging war against the

terrors of the police and the jotedars. If the administration and the Party are

incomprehensible and mysterious in their workings, then, unlike Kafka’s anti-heroes,

Bashai has not submitted to a strange death, but has turned mysterious and impossible,

coming back alive again and again from death and threatening the administration with

a logic of unreality.415 It is impossible to catch him because he is nowhere present by

being present everywhere, like the resistance fighter Matigari ma Nijiruungi in Ngũgĩ

414 See Kafka, The Trial, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Secker and Warburg, 1945); ‘In the

Penal Colony’, in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories, trans. by Joachim

Neugroschel (New York: Scribner, 2000). 415 It should be mentioned here that Devi has repeatedly used the trope of the tribal as the unreal or

ghostly character. This trope seems to serve a particular point for her. The tribals are peripheral

characters whom the colonial and postcolonial state have systematically repressed for their coercive

extracting/occupying of the land and jungle-based resources. For this purpose, which is intricately

associated with racial and caste-based othering and oppression, the tribals have long been represented

by the colonial state as primal, pagan, savage, criminal, and barbaric. The postcolonial state, as we have

seen, has inherited many of these tendencies and strategies. Devi uses this representative image of the

tribal by the state in order to wrestle out a counter-representation where the ‘non-existent’ or the ghostly

is constitutively frightening for the state through its vague but perpetual presence. For references, see

the story ‘Strange Children’, in Kalpana Bardhan, Of Women, Outcastes, Peasants, and Rebels: A

Selection of Bengali Short Stories (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 229-241;

and ‘Mahadu: Ekti Rupkatha’ [Mahadu: A Fairytale] in Mahasweta Devi: Srestha Galpo (Kolkata:

Dey’s, 2004), pp. 292-299.

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wa Thiongʼo’s novel Matigari (1986) who survives several bullet wounds and then

escapes from jail, giving birth to a myth of the non-death of the insurgent.416

In a recent reading of Devi’s tribal stories, Filippo Menozzi tells us that Devi’s

works contain an ‘unreconciled tension between the representational and allegorical

imperatives’.417 Though Devi allegorises historical violence on the tribal through her

fictions, she also guards against an essentialist reading of these fictions by

undermining the conventional representational means of realism, by withholding the

secret or the unwritten in the tribal-social. Menozzi posits that the real in Devi should

be not only located in the historical-social, but also ‘detected and decoded in the

literary work itself, in its figurative texture. In other words the question of realism is

also the question of figuration’.418 Devi’s figurative use of realism lies in the use of

the corpse or the figure of an undying tribal, or in the metaphors of scars, signs, and

the non-colonisation of identity. At the same time, reading this allegorical, figurative

aspect without properly historicising the context would be giving undue privilege to

the textual. The code of Devi’s writing in the final instance is that of the

incommensurability between the techniques of representation and the subjects of

representation (i.e. the tribal) which is precisely the ground for a positive ethical move

– that of solidarity between the writer/reader and her subject. Through Bashai’s

absence proper, Devi indicates the purpose of the struggle, that the Bashais will never

succumb to the physical and discursive pressures of the state, that they will use

guerrilla tactics and their never-ending fighting spirit to threaten the state. Bashai,

through such use, becomes a figurative being, a concept more than a human figure; he

is a crisis incarnate because there is no end to the characters like Bashai. They will

continue to appear and fight the state. In this sense, operation becomes an odd word

(hence the interrogation mark) because the state will never be able to capture Bashai

the concept – epitomised by Bashai’s absence in the cave – but nonetheless will have

to continue to search for Bashai. The implication of the state in the title of these texts

makes it clear that the fate of the state and that of the insurgent, the marginalised, or

the peripheral-figurative are entangled. As Alaknanda Bagchi writes in a reading of

nationalism in the novel, the non-death of Bashai is a reminder to the metropolis that

416 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Matigari, trans. by Wuagui wa Goro (Oxford: Heinemann, 1989). 417 Filippo Menozzi, Postcolonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance (London:

Routledge, 2014), p. 67. 418 Ibid, p.67.

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the history of the displaced remains entangled with that of the metropolis, and that like

the corpse of Bashai, it keeps resurfacing: ‘“the ghostly”, “the terrifying”, “and the

unaccountable” Bashai keeps surfacing to “remind” the metropolis that he will not be

“forgotten”.’419 Bashai’s non-death subverts the possibility of any homogeneous

nationalist discourse: ‘these representations constitute narrative(s) of nation(s) that pry

open the closures of the national discourse, compelling the forces in power to

“remember” what they would rather “forget”.’420 As Devi draws the narrative to a

close, she makes this point about remembrance and struggle clear through words of

hope and optimism in the resistance of the weak: ‘There would come a day when he

would wring the air and give it a body, wring the darkness to turn it to fire. The night

the sixth Bashai buried the fifth and left – how did he look? Let him be very beautiful,

very beautiful, very young. Very […] very […] very’.421 These are powerful

evocations of the beauty of resistance against oppressive regimes. The beauty in the

indefatigable spirit of not dying is capable of giving birth to a day when the dying

bodies will finally be unified and a singular body of tribal self and power will be born.

This use of irrealist elements, including experimentation with narrative time,

an academic style of writing, and narratorial criticism, has often confused critics.

Apart from Menozzi’s reading of figural realism, Minoli Salgado finds a ‘surface

realism’ in Devi which is ‘destabilized by mythic and satiric configurations […] [and]

a mixture of folk dialects and urbane Bengali, slang and Shakespeare, Hindu

mythology and quotations from Marx’.422 In another study, Parama Roy thinks that

Devi’s use of animal allegories, spectres, and non-human figures reveals the limits of

realism because the ‘suffering of the poor exceeds any available language of social

realism.’423 These are all helpful commentaries, but I think these critics tend to view

Devi’s cross-fertilisation of genres and styles as surface-realist, non-realist, or anti-

realist. What I have argued here is that in order to represent exploitations in the

periphery and to give the caste-based or gendered subaltern or peripheral

insurgent/Naxalite figure his or her voice, it is important to use a narrative that teaches

419 Alaknanda Bagchi, ‘Conflicting Nationalism: The Voice of the Subaltern in Mahasweta Devi’s

Bashai Tudu’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 15.1 (1996), pp. 41-50, (p.46). 420 Ibid, p. 48. 421 Devi, Bashai, pp. 147-48. 422 Minoli Salgado, ‘Tribal Stories, Scribal Worlds: Mahasweta Devi and the Unreliable Translator’,

Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 35.1 (2000), 131-46. (p. 131). 423 Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2010), p. 23.

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us, her middle-class readers, and asks us to patiently listen to the subaltern. Devi uses

her protagonists Sujata and Kali strikingly well to situate these aspects, especially

through the quest element – the idea that these middle-class members would require a

physical and psychological quest to understand the problems sympathetically. The

quests have not been materially successful, but they are instrumental in engineering

protest, resistance, and hope in the questers. Through such techniques, Devi fractures

the class-based realist narrative so that the subaltern’s voice can be heard, that the

century-long history of exploitation of the subaltern and the Adivasi can be

foregrounded, that the difficulty of recuperating the tribal or the peripheral (Naxalite)

character’s history can be highlighted, and that middle-class complacency can be

pointed out and criticised. Through the failed quest, then, Devi appears to quest

realism itself, making it a form which, much like the act of living in the peripheries of

the postcolonial world, is always in search of completeness.

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Urban Fantastic Tales

Such innovative and committed writing can hardly be found in the Naxalite fiction

written in the immediate aftermath of the event. Experimentation with form and style

reappears in the late 1990s, but the critical voice of Devi is mostly missing here.

Instead, there is a cynical tone, interspersed with disillusionment and uncertainty.

Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s Ami o Banabihari (Banabihari and I),424 which won the

Sahitya Akademi Award, is a powerful example in this context. This novel is about

the character Ami (which in Bangla means I), who in his early life was a Naxalite and

joined the CPI (M-L) in breaking away from the CPI (M) and participated in the

annihilation campaigns in the villages. Thirty years after the ‘revolution’, in 1997, he

now appears as an old, fragile, disillusioned, mentally challenged human being.

Banabihari, who had been his friend, remained in the CPI (M) and became a politburo

member, making a huge fortune out of party politics. The novel moves back and forth

in time in order to give us fragments of the aftereffects of the movement – the

entrenchment of the bureaucratic and class-based interests in the CPI (M), the rise of

corrupt party members, the decline of the Naxalite movement and its revival in current

times, and so on. What is interesting in the narration is that, notwithstanding the

outline I have presented above, it is never clear if Ami and Banabihari are two different

424 Chattopadhyay, 2000.

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characters. The point that the author makes here through a dense and non-linear style

of narration is that political power makes it inevitable for any Party, Marxist or

otherwise, to bend to the illusions of individual profit, sacrificing the principles of

collective and ideological benefit. Though Banabihari is killed in the end, this bleak

realisation remains intact, pushing us to ask if Ami of the CPI (M-L) would have done

the same thing if he were in power.

Raghab Bandyopadhyay’s Jarnal Sottor (Journal of the 70s)425 is another

notable example from this period. Like Devi’s novel, it follows a compartmentalised

narrative in which the narrator writes a journal of the 1970s foregrounding the

Naxalbari movement. Bandyopadhyay chooses to focus on a narrower area of a city,

where a group of young people, influenced by world-scale historical and

contemporary events, and by Mazumdar’s political speeches and writings, attempt to

overthrow the existing socio-economic and cultural order for a socialist cause. In such

a historical formation, the movement and its cause lose importance and appear as

immature, sudden, and meaningless. The narrative parts, in their narrowness, fail to

relate Bandyopadhyay’s ironic and cynical voice to the larger historical contexts and

realisations. Other notable examples include the jail narratives of Meenakshi Sen and

of the Dalit writer Manoranjan Byapari, the historical fiction of Kinnar Roy, the

travelogues and non-fiction of Sudeep Chakravarti and Rahul Pandita, and the recent

English-language novels by Jhumpa Lahiri and Neel Mukherjee.426

In the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948-2014), the movement and its

aftermath receive a powerful treatment. Son of Mahasweta Devi and Bijon

Bhattacharya, Bhattacharya grew up in the 1960s Bengal under political violence and

the Naxalite crisis.427 His first published story, ‘Bhashan’, was based on the Naxalite

event.428 It is about a madman who was killed during the Naxalite bombings, but who

425 Bandyopadhyay, 2000. 426 Meenakshi Sen, Jeler Bhetor Jel [A Jail within a Jail] (Kolkata: Karigar, 2014); Manoranjan

Byapari, Batashe Baruder Gandho [The Smell of Gunpowder in the Air] (Kolkata: Raktakarobi, 2013);

Kinnar Roy, Mrityu Kusum [Death Bud] (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2007); Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels

in Naxalite Country (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008); Rahul Pandita, Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of

India’s Maoist Movement (Chennai: Tranquebar, 2011); Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (London:

Bloomsbury, 2013); Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others (London: Chatto and Windus, 2014). 427 For a critical introduction to Bhattacharya’s life and works, see ‘Nabarun Bhattacharya’, ed. by

Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Critical Inquiry, 2.1

Sup (2015), 1-198 (pp. 1-15). 428 ‘Bhashan’ [‘Immersion’] was published in the magazine Parichay in 1968 and later collected in

Nabarun Bhattacharya, Shrestho Galpo, ed. by Rajib Choudhuri (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2006), pp. 21-24.

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now speaks of his puzzling death through his dead body. Bhattacharya focuses not on

the heroics of the movement, but rather on how a madman and other marginalised

figures become expendable casualties during the Naxalite violence. His writings

would go on to highlight these characters, the marginalised and insignificant ones in

the postcolonial consumerist societies, who are made victims, rendered invisible, or

turned into criminals.429 In many of his fictions, his narrators call these characters

‘lumpens’ or what in Marxist classification is known as the lumpenproletariat. In The

Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels identify a section of society as ‘the dangerous

class’, which ‘may here and there be swept in the movement by a proletarian

revolution; its conditions of life however prepare it far more for the part of a bribed

tool of reactionary intrigue’.430 However, in Class Struggles in France, 1848-50, Marx

notes that this class, despite its criminal involvement, is able to do the most ‘heroic

and the most exalted sacrifices’ for both revolutionary and reactionary causes.431

Later, Communist leaders and Marxist intellectuals such as Mao Zedong and Frantz

Fanon recognise the revolutionary potential in the category. Mao thought the

lumpenproletariat ‘were able to fight bravely but apt to be destructive’ so they need to

be ‘properly guided’,432 while Fanon states that ‘any movement for freedom ought to

give its fullest attention to this lumpenproletariat’. Since this is an uneducated,

vulnerable, and weak class, ‘If this available reserve of human effort is not

immediately recognized by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired

soldiers side by side with the colonial troops’.433 It has an especially important role

and meaning in the postcolonial context. Sumanta Banerjee, in his introduction to the

translation of Mahasweta Devi’s short stories in Bait, tells us how this class fraction

historically evolved into an underworld mafia in Bengal in the 1960s, helping the

429 The Naxalite story ‘Khnochor,’ for instance, is about how a lower-class secret informer lives his life

in fear of getting shot by a Naxalite or exploded by the Naxalite use of ‘Molotov Cocktail’. The graphic

description of violence related with the Naxalite events is striking here. Another story, ‘Halal Jhanda’

[‘Faithful Flag’], describes in a slow-motion effect how a bomb explodes and its splinters wound and

mutilate the bodies of the small time crooks. For a critical introduction to Nabarun’s works, see

‘Nabarun Bhattacharya’, ed. by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay, Sanglap: Journal of

Literary and Critical Inquiry, 2.1 Sup (2015), 1-198. 430 Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 14. 431 Karl Marx, Class Struggle in France, 1848-1850, p. 23, Marxist.Org

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ [accessed 18 Jan, 2017]. 432 Mao Zedong, ‘Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society’, in Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung, Vol

I (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), p. 19. 433 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 109.

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Congress and Left parties to hold power.434 This section of society came into being in

the aftermath of the Bengal famine, which left the urban poor with increasingly

volatile conditions. For survival reasons, they provided the ruling class with the

muscle-power it sought: ‘the troika (politician-gangster-police) received the boost in

the 1960s and 1970s when the ruling politicians and the administration sought the help

of the underworld to destroy the Naxalite movement and eliminate its peasant and

student cadres’.435 But it was not only used by the police and the bourgeoisie in power.

In his analysis of the Naxalbari movement, Banerjee also notes that the

lumpenproletariat was used by the CPI (M-L) as well for assassinating the police and

the police’s informers:

In West Bengal, the lumpenproletariat’s rootlessness and affinity to the

underworld made it responsible to at least one aspect of the CPI (M-L) urban

strategy – assassination of police and informers. In 1970-71, the political

actions of the CPI (M-L) cadres and the settling of private scores by the city’s

lumpenproletariat often shaded off into each other. In some areas, notorious

gangsters infiltrated into the CPI (M-L) organizations, sometimes at the behest

of the police, and were partly responsible for bringing discredit to the

movement.436

This dual use gave the lumpenproletariat a negative identity. They were seen as

opportunistic and reactionary. Since the section belonged to the category of the urban

poor, the entire section of the urban poor ended up being identified as a ‘criminal’ or

‘dangerous’ class in the post-independence period.437 Bhattacharya’s stories capture

the everyday life and struggles of this class of people, which includes gangsters, spies,

thieves, beggars, sweepers, loafers, prostitutes, and others. Bhattacharya does not

necessarily criminalise the class fraction, nor does he extol their virtues for organised

Left politics. He shows how they live on a hand-to-mouth basis, how they have

evolved over time as a marginalised and neglected category, and how there could be

434 Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Introduction’, Bait: Four Stories/Mahasweta Devi, trans. by Sumanta Banerjee

(Kolkata: Seagull, 2004), pp. vii-xxii (pp. xii-xiv). 435 Ibid, p. xiii. 436 Banerjee, Simmering, p. 54. 437 Sumanta Banerjee, ‘West Bengal Today: An Anticipatory Post-Mortem’, Economic and Political

Weekly, 25.33 (1990), pp. 1812-16; Banerjee, Bait, vii-xx; Romesh Thapar, ‘Explosions and Stirrings’,

Economic and Political Weekly, 17.44 (1982), 1763; ‘A Dangerous Edge to Our Politics’, Economic

and Political Weekly, 19.10 (1984), 407.

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a case of unified ‘warfare’ and resistance in them against the bourgeois and the

repressive machineries of the state.

In his later fiction, Bhattacharya’s lumpen characters take on fantastic, parodic,

and revolutionary forms.438 Harbart, for instance, is a novel about an orphan who is

physically abused and cannot talk properly, but who later discovers super-human

powers of talking to the dead and then challenges the Rationalist Association when he

is threatened with exposure. In Kāngāl Mālshāt, fyatarus (lower-class people who can

fly) and choktars (people from the same class who practise black magic) plot

mysterious warfare against the bourgeoisie and the state machineries because their

demands have not been met. These fictions are urban fantastic tales in terms of mode.

The urban fantasy mode includes novels that employ supernatural elements in a

contemporary urban setting, such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

(1997; written between 1928 and 1934)439, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates (1983), and

Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks (1987).440 Fantasy scholar Alexander Irvine writes

that, ‘The elements common to all urban fantasies [are] – a city in which supernatural

events occur, the presence of prominent characters who are artists or musicians or

scholars, [and] the redeployment of previous fantastic and folkloric topoi in unfamiliar

438 In his earlier fictions, the characters include: Kalmon and Moglai, two small-time thieves (‘Kalmon

and Moglai’); Foyara, a prostitute who has a mysterious disease (‘Foyara’r Jonyo Duschinta’ [‘Anxiety

for Foyara’]); a poor and failed writer who wants to write a story about a blind cat in a hotel he stayed

in the past (‘Andho Beral’ [‘Blind Cat’]); four dead-body bearers who are deaf and are carrying a

mysterious corpse through the heart of the city (‘4+1’); a middle-aged man who fears that he will be

killed soon for some mysterious reasons (‘Amar Kono Bhoy Nei Toh’ [‘I Don’t Have to Fear, Do I?’]),

etc. These characters are culled from everyday life and can be seen inhabiting the Third World

postcolonial urban space on the streets and footpaths, in the dark and forbidden alleys, in the whore

houses, morgues, police-stations, and in the slums. They are everywhere, and are an indispensable force

of labour for the state, which Partha Chatterjee has influentially termed the ‘political society’. See

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 53-80. For these stories, see Bhattacharya, Srestho

Galpo; some of these stories have been translated in the Nabarun Bhattacharya edition in the journal,

Sanglap. See ‘Nabarun Bhattacharya’, Sanglap, 2.1 sup. 439 Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. by Richard Pervear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London:

Penguin, 1997); it should be mentioned here that Bhattacharya has repeatedly spoken about his

inspiration from Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol, and other Russian urban fantastic writers. Considering that

these writers were writing either under Czarist Russia or during the early Stalinist orthodoxy, and used

‘modernist’ and fabulist elements widely in their works to critique the current sociopolitical

dispensation, Bhattacharya’s use of these elements indicates a genealogical connection here. On this,

see the special issue on Bulgakov in Bhattacharya’s edited journal, Bhashabandhan III (Kolkata:

Bhashabandhan, 2012). 440 Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (New York: Ace Books, 1983); Emma Bull, War for the Oaks (New

York: Ace Books, 1987). This has become a fast-growing genre, mixing often with the series-based

teen fiction or adult fantasy works such as Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, The Hunger Games (New York:

Scholastic Press, 2010).

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contexts’.441 While two of the other elements (the city and the fantastic) appear in

Bhattacharya’s fiction, there is no artist or musician, supposedly from the privileged

classes. Instead, the fantastic characters here are all from the lower classes for whom,

unlike for the upper and middle classes, their supernatural powers do not appear to be

alien, other-worldly, or abnormal, but rather as part of the everyday cultural belief

system. These features point to two specific uses of the fantastic in Bhattacharya: that

the fantastic has a strategic, class-based meaning; and that it is related with the

‘normal-rational’ world.442 Fantasy, as both Tzvetan Todorov and Rosemary

Jackson443 remind us, is a subversive tool through which the bourgeois social order

and its arrangement of mimetic realism/literature are challenged. Bhattacharya uses

the fantastic for this purpose, but also for a more rooted class-based meaning. The

fyatarus and choktars work as domestic helpers, sweepers, barbers, salesmen, and in

other capacities – in short, the workforce needed by the urban bourgeoisie. They are a

constant presence in the consumerist world, but because of their marginal class

positions and low purchase capabilities, they are identified as negligible/marginal

actors on the metropolitan-consumerist stage. By allowing these people the power of

the supernatural and the fantastic, Bhattacharya turns them into recognisable bodies

and agents. The use of the fantastic appears particularly important because it is the

alterity in their quotidian, mimetic self,444 and their empowered presence through

‘irrational’ means in the space of the ‘normal-rational’, that puzzle and terrify the

bourgeoisie. There is a clear suggestion here that, despite the state’s shameful erasure

441 Alexander Irvine, ‘Urban Fantasy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. by

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 200-13, (p.

201). 442 Farah Mendlesohn calls this kind of fantasy immersive fantasy. She argues that the fantastic has

many forms, such as the quest-portal, the intrusive, the liminal, and the immersive; it is in the immersive

category that the fantastic is deployed within the ‘normal-rational’ as a component of the everyday and

the normalised. See Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,

2008), pp. 59-113. 443 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by Richard

Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of

Subversion (London: Routledge, 1988). 444 I am using the concept of alterity from Michael Taussig. In Mimesis and Alterity, through an

ethnography of the healing practices of the Cuna Indians and through a reading of Walter Benjamin,

Taussig writes that mimesis, which is the process of copying from an original idea (or a prototype),

includes the concept of contact and anticipation. It is a relationship with the Other, and constitutes its

being from knowledges and values generated from the acts of communion with the Other. He defines

alterity as ‘a relationship, not a thing in itself, and in this [the Cuna Indians’] case an actively mediated

colonial relationship meeting contradictory and conflicting European expectations of what constitutes

Indianness’. See Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge,

1993), p. 130.

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of these people from the public gaze, they will fight back in their own ways, through

the mobilisation of their empowering cultural practices and through their long histories

of militant (peasant) politics. In this portrayal, Bhattacharya’s work reminds us of

China Miéville use of the fantastic, especially in such works as Iron Council and The

City & The City, where Miéville’s characters employ supernatural powers for class

warfare against a bureaucratic, biopolitical meta-body in the attempt to build a

socialist future.445 This strongly political and critical nature appears to distinguish the

mode from magical realism, which also deploys the quotidian existence of the magical

with the real in everyday society, but in which the element of criticality is either

missing or dominantly folded within its figurative devices.446 In Bhattacharya or in

Miéville, the characters using the supernatural and the fantastic are forceful, vocal,

and critical of society’s norms. Moreover, the narrator himself/herself is also critical

and sarcastic of establishment politics and media. As in Devi, he or she enters

forcefully in every chapter and provides bitter, critical commentary on particular social

norms or the dominant consumerist tendencies of the middle classes. These structural

and narratorial interruptions echo Jameson’s use of ‘modernistic realism’ and more

forcefully point to Michael Löwy’s notion of critical irrealism. Löwy reminds us that

irrealism is not anti-realism, but rather a critical review of realism where the

limitations within realism’s representational strategies are challenged. This challenge

is not ‘a rational argument, a systematic opposition, or an explicit discourse; more

often, in irrealist art, it takes the form of protest, outrage, disgust, anxiety, or angst’.447

I will show how Bhattacharya’s angst and outrage at the Communist government’s

rationalist-consumerist drives in post-Naxalism Bengal is represented through the

critical use of the supernatural and fantastic powers by the urban poor. Through these

characters and their militant politics, Bhattacharya tells us that Naxalism is not dead.

445 See China Miéville, Iron Council (London: Del Rey, 2004); The City & The City (London: Pan,

2011). 446 In scholarly research, magical realism and the fantastic are often interchangeable in terms of the

subversive nature of form [Sharon Seiber, ‘Magic Realism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy,

ed. by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 167-

78]. Subversion here is read as challenging and undermining the dominant version of truth. Where I

think Bhattacharya’s work is different is in his strategic use of the fantastic, its clear engagement with

and critique of established forms, and its lower-class-based political eruptions. For a reading of the

critical strain in the magic realist form and its sustained erasure for commercial purposes, see:

Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence

(London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 7-12; and Sharae Deckard, ‘Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism,

and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666’, Modern Language Quarterly, 73.3 (2012), 351-72. 447 Löwy, p. 196. I will discuss the use of the term magical realism more broadly in the next chapter.

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Rather, it has been adapted differently to suit the current nature of political and

ideological struggles. He looks back to the Naxalite decades448 and produces a

caricature of the Naxalite rebel, whose parodic and vulgar humour and political

demands indicate how the Communist leaders/revolutionaries have degenerated into

selfish consumerists in the postcolonial period. The militant acts also revive the

Naxalite ideology of resistance against the state’s hyper-rationalising and repressive-

modernising drives. In this capacity, urban space becomes the most significant trope

for registering the political energies of the fantastic. Following Rashmi Varma, I will

read this nature of the urban postcolonial space as ‘conjunctural’. Varma analyses the

relations, imprints, and inheritance of imperial and colonial power structures in the

literary-cultural registrations of spatial unevenness in postcolonial Bombay, Nairobi,

and London. The postcolonial city, for her, needs to be understood as space that

‘produces a critical combination of historical events, material bodies, structural forces,

and representational economies that propel new constellations of domination and

resistance, centres and peripheries, and the formation of the new political subjects’.449

I will show here how Harbart registers the critical combination of events, forces,

economies, and cultures, and produces an uneven aesthetic through its dialectical use

of the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’. In the next section, I will argue that in Kāngāl

Mālshāt, Nabarun Bhattacharya allows the urban poor and the subaltern to declare

their empowered presence through irreal guerrilla warfare that includes wide-scale

filth-making and defiling of postcolonial public space. This use of the urban fantastic

mode in Bhattacharya, I will argue, helps us understand the composite nature of

postcolonial urbanity (in the aftermath of Naxalism) and the tremendous political

energies within realism.

448 Bhattacharya’s creative and intellectual growth began in these decades. Apart from his stories, see

his widely cited poem, ‘E Mrityu Upotyoka Amar Desh Na’ [‘This Valley of Death is Not My Country’]

(1973), for an understanding of his involvement with Naxalite politics, and his angry response to the

state for its repressive violence and to the civil society for its numbness and negligence. These opening

lines from the poem may give us a sense here: ‘The father who fears identifying his son’s corpse | I hate

him much | The brother who is still normal and shameless | I hate him much | The teachers, scholars,

poets, clerks | who do not ask for revenge | I hate them much […] This valley of death is not my country

| This executioner’s roaring is not my country | This earth of bones and corpses is not my country | This

bloody slaughterhouse is not my country’ (Kolkata: Saptarshi Prakashan, 2004), pp. 11-12. My

translation. 449 Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (London:

Routledge, 2012), p. 1.

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Harbart and Spatial Unevenness

Harbart450 is the story of Harbart Sarkar. Born in a once-rich ‘babu’ (colonial gentry)

family in Southern Calcutta and losing his parents as an infant, Harbart grows up

lonely and friendless in his uncle’s house and is abused by his cousin, Dhanna-da.

Living in his own world of reading ghost stories and séance and afterlife-related books,

he develops a strange vocabulary and an isolated form of living, which brings him

neglect and insults such as ‘freak’ or ‘crazy’ from street urchins and his neighbours.

It is from his nephew Binu, who comes to live with Harbart’s family for higher studies

in Calcutta, that he receives respect as a fellow human being for the first time. Binu

dies in the Naxalite police violence, and a disturbed Harbart ‘discovers’ his

superhuman powers of ‘conversations with the dead’ soon after that. Binu and his

Naxalite involvement thus play a very marginal role in the narrative, but they are

crucial for Harbart’s charactorial transformation. Binu’s character is developed in fast

brushstrokes. He is described very briefly in the fourth chapter as a studious, sensitive

college boy who teaches young children in order to earn money and buys Harbart

clothes from his earnings. He is inspired by Charu Mazumdar’s ‘clarion call’ for

revolution.451 The Barasat police’s massacre of the Naxalites on 19 November 1970

motivates him to join the CPI (M-L)’s revolutionary politics. He wants Harbart to read

Mao Zedong’s The Red Book and to understand the beauty of sacrifice for a collective

socialist cause, rather than to ‘waste time’ in the ‘nonsensical’ world of ghosts and

religion.452 This conversation between Binu and Harbart gives us some crucial insight

into the ways in which Naxalism is figured in the novel:

Binu had given a different explanation to Harbart, who was interested in the

afterworld.

What’s all that rubbish you read. It’s all fraud. Ridiculous. So-and-so died and

came back as a ghost, such-and-such person became a spirit after death – every

page is full of ghosts, have you ever seen one yourself? It’s not as though

people haven’t died. Who knows how many have died in this house alone?

Does it have to be untrue just because I haven’t seen it?

450 Harbart (Kolkata: Dey’s, 1993) was published in 1993 and won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s

most prestigious literary prize, in 1994. The novel has been translated twice into English. I am using

the translation by Arunava Sinha (Chennai: Tranquebar, 2011). 451 Ibid, p. 49. 452 Ibid, p. 49.

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No just you, no one has.

Then what about the planchette?

What about it? I’ve seen it myself in Berhampore.

You have? They came?

Why shouldn’t they? The people themselves push the glass towards the letters

or shake the pencil. But why blame you. As long as few people continue to

fool millions of human beings into working till they die, as long as they cheat

them, ghosts and your gods and goddesses and religion will all survive. Listen

to this. (Binu opened a small book, turned its pages)

‘Thousands of martyrs are embracing death as we watch, every living person’s

heart is agonised whenever we think of them, is there any interest that we

cannot sacrifice, any error that we cannot rectify? […]’ Have you any idea who

wrote this?

Harbart shook his head. He had no idea about any of this.

Mao Tse Tung.453

Binu is a rationalist. He does not believe in ghosts not only because no one has seen

them, but also because he has ‘seen’ how a planchette (mediumship with spirits

through devices on a wooden board) works, and so has seen how and to what effect

ideology (ritual/religion) is produced. Nonetheless, there is a scientistic positivism

underlying his dismissal of the supernatural. Note that he is also deeply moved by the

aspect of the sacrificial. What he reads to Harbart is not the tactics of guerrilla warfare

or the deplorable conditions of the peasants in China, but a particular passage in The

Red Book which is entirely about the idealisation of collective death, an agonised

apotheosis of the sacrificial. It seems that the drive towards death becomes more

important for the Naxalite (exceeding Maoism here by some distance) than properly

carrying out political plans and tactics for a sustained revolutionary politics.454 Harbart

appears to be moved by Binu’s revolutionary talk and starts helping him.455 It is

however important to note that Bhattacharya’s narrator does not speak of any growth

of revolutionary or political consciousness in the character. Unlike Bashai who is

453 Ibid, pp. 48-49. 454 Nabarun’s narrator does not tell us whether it is right or wrong to do so; he or she simply narrates

the events and leaves the judgement to the reader. 455 ‘One day Binu had sent Harbart with a good deal of money and a booklet of receipts with pictures

pf Mao Tse Tung and Lin Piao to one Bijay in the Lake Market area’. Ibid, p. 51.

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politically educated, or Poran Porel who at least knows about the links between class

and caste oppression and mocks the powers that be, Harbart appears to have no

consciousness of any politics whatsoever. He helps Binu because he loves him,

because he loves to imagine revolutionary death and sacrifice.456 On his deathbed,

Binu whispers to Harbart about a diary kept behind the image of the goddess Kali in

the prayer room.457 A few days later, Harbart tells the family about a dream in which

Binu told him about this diary. The narrator does not tell us why Harbart decides to

reveal this piece of information (whether there is any political motivation behind his

declaration), and narrates in a linear fashion Harbart’s joy in discovering the diary and

the starting of his business, ‘conversations with the dead’. The timing of this

declaration is interesting. He declares this after the death of Binu, who taught him to

imagine the beauty of the sacrificial, the afterlife of the martyrs, and the necessity of

death for the revolutionary cause. Binu is the one who during his life fought the

bourgeoisie, the educated middle and lower-middle classes and their reactionary

forces and ideologies, and who challenged the police and its repressive power in

seeking to establish a ‘beautiful’ world. The class and society Binu fought against are

also the ones that have humiliated Harbart throughout his life. His declaration thus

appears to be political in a particular way: enabled by Binu’s invocation to

revolutionary afterlife, Harbart, who has read about afterlife and the dead throughout

these years, and has been termed crazy for his ‘strange’ vocabulary and behaviour,

appears to make a different use out of it. He proclaims to know the afterlife and what

the dead seek, which attracts middle-class and upper-middle-class clients, who

disclose their secrets and fears in their desperate attempts to seek penance or material

profit from the unknown. In these acts, Harbart appears to control their lives through

his ‘irrational’ logic. Although Harbart is aware that his reasons are based on his

learnings from books rather than any intuitive knowledge (the narrator clarifies that

he sincerely believes in them and is not cheating his clients), he feels empowered

through this act; more so, because he can detect the ‘irrational’, strange, and secretive

aspirations and practices of the ‘rational’ and orderly middle classes, he can potentially

control their lives too.

456 The narrator adds after a few lines: ‘Harbart had not come to know that the same Bijoy had died in

police firing in front of a snacks shop’. Ibid, p. 51. 457 Ibid, p. 54.

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After his discovery, the rumour about Harbart spreads fast. Indeed, after his

success in the first year, articles are written on him in local and national dailies. This

fame fetches wealthy clients, promoters like Surapati Maarik who work on the ‘saintly

businesses’, and finally the challengers, Prabir Ghosh and the West Bengal Rationalist

Association who are on a mission to ‘rid the state of people like Harbart’.458 It is

phenomenal how Harbart becomes so popular in such a short time. Why does this

happen? Why does the ‘rational’ urban population believe in his newfound super-

power so easily? Is it because he is considered a ‘freak’? Or, is there a case to be made

about the supernatural and the non-rational being integral to the constitution of

postcolonial urban life? The novel begins on May 25, 1992, the day that Harbart dies,

and then goes back to his birth and develops the narrative in a Bildungsroman format.

1992 was an important year for India. In 1991 India declared the liberalisation of its

economy, and from 1992, it opened its doors officially to multinational capitalism with

policies of deregulation, huge tax exemption, and other lucrative deals for foreign

companies, in order to recover the debt-and-inflation-ravaged economy.459 This is also

the year that saw the demolition of the 1527-built mosque Babri Masjid and a

resumption of the bloody communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.460 To put

these two issues together, if the year propagated globalisation and deregulation as

essential for development and as constitutive of the governance of the postcolonial

‘rational’ subject, the dark and ‘unreasonable’ events of communal violence also made

it clear that the society was still at least partly feudal and partly neo-colonial in

character.461 It is impractical to govern a country based solely on enlightenment values

458 Maarik tells him that he would help expand the business ‘in style’: ‘a glass-enclosed air-conditioned

swank office […] a woman to operate the computer. Shiny expensive books about all this on the shelves.

Soft music. Dim lights. Carpet. Five hundred bucks a visit’, etc. Ibid, p. 95. 459 Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism, and

Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 143-72. 460 Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1996), pp. 449-81; for a brief history of this period, see Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf,

Concise History, pp. 265-94. 461 This is also why there was a furore in Calcutta around the same time with the death of Balak

Brahmachari, a.k.a. Birendra Charkraborty, who was the leader of a religious sect known as Santana

Dal. After Brahmachari died, his followers declared the death as a Samadhi (the last stage of meditation

without physical consciousness). They said he would rise again, as he had on a previous occasion, and

guarded his dead body closely, allowing no one to enter the ashram. After many complaints from the

neighbours, and after the influential local daily Ajkaal had started covering the incident widely, the

police were sent to the area to remove the dead body, resulting in multiple skirmishes with the followers.

Finally, the rotten body of the ‘saint’ was removed, making many think that this delay was a deliberate

case of state lobbying (as the Santan Dal workers were traditionally CPI (M) voters). For a longer

reading, see Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, pp. 40-80. Bhattacharya would later write a novel,

Mausoleum (Kolkata: Dey’s 2007) based on this incident.

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that has evolved from thousands of years of different knowledge- and culture-regimes.

It is equally unrealistic to shape the people’s subjectivity based exclusively on a

system of instrumentalist knowledge-gathering and bureaucratic rationality. The

current postcolonial modern state can preach that reason is its governing drive, but

that does not uproot or invalidate years of local, custom-based ritual and cultural

practices, or people’s belief in such practices. This is why a publicly-marked ‘weird’

person like Harbart can suddenly and persuasively declare that he can talk with the

dead and be a medium between the other-worldly and the worldly. Thousands of

people gather at his place and listen to his dramatic speeches on afterlife and on the

various geometrical spheres that the living and the dead belong to.462 The attraction of

the ‘irrational’, Bhattacharya suggests here, is precisely that it exposes the myths of

material development even as it is produced by the latter. As Harbart is challenged by

the Rationalist Association for his ‘trickery’ and threatened with arrest, he replies:

‘Fine. That’s fine. We’ll take care of you too […] When they were leaving, Harbart

was chanting as he danced around the room – oh my god how I humped them! Cat bat

water dog fish! Cat bat water dog fish!’463 The narrator adds that it is never clear what

Harbart means by the word ‘we’, but the readers may wonder if he means the group

of people who practise these kind of acts, i.e. the fortune-tellers, sorcerers, astrologers,

and the like, who use ‘non-rational’ means to calculate and speak about the human

past and future. ‘We’ may also refer to the majority of people who believe in these

acts of afterlife and fortune-telling, or those who find it unnecessary and unfitting for

a postcolonial society to erase these practices and to instead embrace the ‘hyper-

rational’ instrumentalist drives for a regime of reason and normality. Throwing a

counter-challenge at the Association in his own vocabulary, in vulgar Bengali slang,

Harbart feels empowered. He dances around in joy and utters his nonsensical

composition, ‘cat bat water dog fish’, suggesting a verbal triumph over reason,

science, and the borrowed Anglicised manners and practices (manifest in the

Association members’ westernised dressing and use of English). Although in the next

scene Harbart is found dead in his house, there is a cryptic suicide note that says he is

on some sort of a pilgrimage.464 Hence, we are given the warning that his death should

462 However, the narrator tells us that he learns of this world from his ‘after-world’ readings. 463 Bhattacharya, Harbart, p. 114. 464 The note reads, ‘The guppy of the tank is off to the ocean. | Want to see the double chyang? Dying

to see | the double chyang? Cat bat water dog fish’. See Bhattacharya, Harbart, p. 131. Though the

police or the family and neighbours are not able to recover the meaning or context, the reader has

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not be taken as the end of the game; he will come back. The fact that his corpse

explodes in the crematorium furthers the sense of puzzle and mystery for the police

and the journalists, the bourgeois ‘rational’ subject. Through these acts, Bhattacharya

indicates that the mysterious and puzzling co-existence of the religious, ritualistic,

non-rational, immaterial elements and the rational, material, and scientific aspects of

society is a fundamental aspect of the nature of Indian urban society. Erasing people

like Harbart as part for the drive towards westernising society and culture is to

overlook the historico-cultural constitution of the society itself.

Harbart registers this aspect of the ‘irrational’ and the uneven in the everyday

‘rational-normal’ in the distribution and arrangement of urban space. As the brief

Naxalite part of the novel ends, the narrator comments that ‘The fetid, dank,

inconsequential period that followed was so wearying as to be unparalleled in history,

at any rate. And it was doubtful whether anything changed even over centuries in the

fragment of the city where Harbart lived’.465 The Naxalbari movement failed to bring

any substantial social or political change, and was followed by a time of gentrification

where the urban space was re-arranged in alignment with the shifting aspirations for

the globalised consumerist culture: ‘the multi-storeyed structures put up by real-estate

promoters to replace the old buildings had ensured a change of taste’.466 What this

change meant for the urban poor is that people like Harbart with their ‘weird’

imaginations and cultural practices would have to live with these current

transformations of space and society, and to continue to be neglected, victimised, and

rendered invisible. As I will shortly show through the (dissenting) examples of

Harbart, the urban poor would have to use nooks and corners and live in slums and

already seen Harbart’s physical and psychological growth thanks to the novel’s Bildungsroman

narrative, and would know that the first line refers to an abuse Harbart received from his cousin,

Dhanna-da, about him being a ‘guppy of the tank’, which means weak, limited in knowledge, and

unfamiliar with the world outside. The latter half of the line about going to the ocean resonates an earlier

episode in which Harbart shouted at the people of the Rationalist Association, challenged them, abused

them, and ran them out of his house. The line therefore means that he is not a small and weak fish

anymore; he is about to meet the bigger fishes and come back with them. The ‘double chyang’ reference

comes from the Howrah (West Bengal) railway labourers. Chyang is a fish of shallow and filthy water.

The allusion makes the point that it is unwise to oppress the labourers, ‘filthy’ people, for they possess

such weird powers that there would be no hope for the powerful. How Harbart knew of this phrase, the

narrator informs, is never known. The references to ‘cat bat’ and others in the third line were used by

Harbart whenever he encountered anything aristocratic, anglicised, and refined in manners. He uttered

this phrase repeatedly to register his verbal triumph over the use of English and scientific logic by the

Rationalist Association. 465 Ibid, p. 55. 466 Ibid, p. 55.

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shanties that are shaded off from public life, because the bourgeois-consumerist

arrangement of space has hardly given them a recognisable place, capital or visibility,

and wants them to be quarantined or liquidated for a sanitised vision of the city.467 But

since these people are also needed by the bourgeoisie as a labour-force, the urban poor

would still have to be there, even if rendered invisible. Space thus appears to be a

potent trope through which Bhattacharya situates his notion of postcolonial modernity.

This notion of space has a historical link with the fantastic. José B. Monleón tells us

that the fantastic genre emerged with the rise of modernity in Britain. It was born in

the nineteenth century when mercantile and industrial capitalism attempted to

suppress and supersede older feudalist forms of knowledge and belief systems, paving

way for the return of the ‘irrational’ in the form of the sublime and the gothic as

cultural forms integral to the material development of society: ‘unreason was now the

product of society’ rather than a foreign intrusion into the social.468 In colonial times,

as a number of critics have argued, modernity had an ambiguous, coeval character, in

which the colonialist aspiration to search for the ‘rational’, and the practice and

preservation of age-old customs and the ‘irrational’, went hand-in-hand, becoming

coagulated in time.469 In the postcolonial context in general, with the aggressive

expanse of advanced forms of global capitalism and consumerism, modernity’s coeval

character became more intense with the revival of local cultural practices to adapt to

its new socio-economic demands. Anthropologists John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

inform us that ‘intensified market competition [in contemporary South Africa has] set

many people in motion and disrupted their sense of place; dispersed class relations

across international borders; and widened the gulf between flows of fiscal circulation

and sites of concrete production, thus permitting speculative capital to appear to

determine the fate of postrevolutionary societies’.470 This has dramatically widened

the gaps between the rich and the poor, producing on the one hand a consumerist,

comfortably settled, and visibly rich middle class, and on the other, raw inequality,

467 For a reading of how the postcolonial metropolis attempts to sanitise the space by covering up its

ugly slums and its urban poor in order to cater to globalised capitalism, see Rahul Pandita’s chapter,

‘Give me Red’, in Hello, Bastar, pp. 1-14, where he records the strategies of cleaning Delhi before the

2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games. 468 José B. Monleón, A Spectre is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 81-103, (p. 67). 469 See Chatterjee, Modernity, p. 20; Kaviraj, ‘Indian’, p. 157; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe,

pp. 37-46. 470 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial

Capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101.4 (2002), 779-805 (p. 797).

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poverty, and dispossession, encouraging the ‘desires’ of imitation by the have-nots.

Such desires have forcefully brought back the ‘occult economies’ of witch-hunting,

black magic, or zombie-labour in the urban spaces, the use of which by the lower

classes points at the caricaturing of the logic of demand and supply (speculative

capital) in acquiring wealth without conventional means and costs of labour. Magic in

this process re-codes the value system of surplus labour: wealth created out of

nothing.471 The rise of a ‘spectral army of labour’, i.e. the use of illegal immigrants

and unofficial bodies for wage labour (night work) or fraudulent activities, the two

Comaroffs add, is associated with a ‘discontent’ and ‘anger’ of the lower class with

the current realities of joblessness, poverty, and structural inequality. The occult

practices of witchcraft and black magic should not be seen as some exotic and

enchanting ‘magical realist’ elements in society (which are sold by the media in the

global literary-cultural marketplace); rather, a more serious and critical engagement is

necessary to comprehend the discontent and the contradictory logic of capital in

postcolonial societies.472 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee tells us that the various

contemporary literary and cultural examples (the fictions of Ivan Vladislavić or the

film District 9, for instance) of black magic and ‘alien-labour’ in a global city like

Johannesburg ‘point to the historical tendencies through which [these practices]

operate under conditions of uneven development’.473 He reads the unevenness in

spatial production of South Africa, especially the co-existence of the modern glitzy

towers and the archaic modes of life in the slums, not only as aspects of adaptability

and creative energy, but also as indications of long histories of dispossession and

dehumanisation of the national and local forms of life by forces of transnational

capitalism, ‘the enforced and involuntary conditions of migration, circumlocution and

“flexible existence”’.474 The historical basis of the fantastic as generated from the

suppression of the ‘irrational’ through the birth of ‘rational’ regimes of knowledge

production, and the literary uses of it for a critique of uneven postcolonial modernity,

echo prominently in Bhattacharya’s conjunctural use of space.475 His fiction, as we

471 Ibid, p. 786. 472 ‘Alien-Nation’, p. 789; see also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Occult Economies and Violence

of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’, American Ethnologist, 26.2 (1999), 279-

303, (p. 284). 473 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, ‘Ivan Vladislavić: Traversing the Uneven City’, Journal of

Postcolonial Writing, 48.5 (2012), 472-84, (p. 473). 474 Ibid, p. 476; emphasis in original. 475 A comparative reference here is Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1992), trans. by Rose-Myriam

Réjouis (London: Granta, 1997).

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will now see in both of his works, not only brings material and non-material spaces

together to suggest the complex binding of postcolonial urbanity, but also uses them

effectively to employ a fierce social critique of multinational capitalism and Left

politics in the contemporary context.

There are at least four different kinds of material spaces or spatial

arrangements in Harbart. The first is the isolated, but enclosed, intimate space of

Harbart’s attic roof. I term this the vertical space (for the roof connection), which also

has a meaning of self-empowerment. In order to escape from the humiliating public

world, Harbart used to come to the attic roof and hide himself in a defunct water-tank,

devouring his books on the afterlife. The narrator writes, ‘The attic roof used to be

Harbart’s space. All his realizations had come to him there. On that very attic roof

Harbart had had the extraordinary dream that had brought him social recognition and

fame, but, indirectly, had also been the cause of his total destruction’.476 The dream

here refers to the dream of Binu’s diary. This episode has not yet happened at this

point, so the narrator foreshadows an anxious anticipation here. Note also the

statement that all his realisations have come to him there. Since Harbart is an orphan

and socially ostracised for his eccentric behavior and speech patterns, he is shown to

develop an interest in reading books on the afterlife to know where his parents are.

Slowly this interest becomes a habit, and he is drawn to the persuasive arguments and

logic in these books, which provide him not only an escape route to and solace from a

different comforting world, but also gives him answers to many puzzling, abusive acts

by his cousins and neighbours. Consider the narration in the following episode, where

Harbart’s aunt, who is sympathetic to Harbart, is arguing with her son, Dhanna-da,

over Harbart’s share of their property:

He’s a good boy, that’s why he never asks [for his share of property]. What’s

wrong with asking? Shouldn’t he get his father’s share?

Now you’re making me lose my temper. To hell with his father’s share. Are

there enough brains in that skull of his to manage his property? Share! Balls!

What’ll you do if he does ask?

476 Bhattacharya, Harbart, p. 33.

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I’ll beat him up till he runs away, that’s what I’ll do. What about the cost of

food and clothes for all these years? Let him account for that. I’ll tear that

motherfucker apart.477

After these dialogues, the narrator divulges no information regarding how the matter

goes, what kind of share Harbart has, if he is beaten by Dhanna-da. There is no arousal

of sentimental sympathy for Harbart. What is offered is a mode of narration where

Harbart’s thoughts and the narrator’s appear the same. In this diegetic narration, we

are made sure that the afterworld has the best answers and Harbart is correct in seeking

them from this world. The narrator asks:

Did the books in Harbart’s room offer an explanation?

Sensual materialists are unable to understand the afterworld. Leave

alone the afterworld, they are unable to understand many subtle aspects

even of earthly life. Their minds and bodies are perpetually obsessed

with and addicted to sensual and materialist pleasures; hence the pure

truth concerning the afterworld is not instilled in their minds […].

– Mysteries of the Afterworld 478

The answer to the narrator’s question is not given by the narrator ‘himself’ or by

Harbart, but by an excerpt from a book. It suggests that Harbart has full faith in the

reasoning and logic of the afterworld. The narrator is also sympathetic to Harbart in

his rationalisation of the latter’s acts of knowing the afterworld and believing in its

truth-claims. The narrator has full faith in Harbart and is never judgmental or

condescending in ‘his’ remarks, although ‘he’ is at times disapproving of Harbart’s

acts, like a participant-narrator full of critical solidarity with the characters. Much of

the narration in the first part and Harbart’s particular development of character (his

‘realizations’) take place on the attic space. This attic space, we are told, has not only

saved him from the abuse of bullies outside, but is also connected with a pleasant

world of kites, flying cranes, rising smoke, and exploration of sexuality. Against

popular perception, he thinks of himself as an important, forceful, and imaginative

person who knows about realities beyond the façade of the real in life, about the

possibilities that the future holds for mankind, and about the curative power of talking

477 Ibid, p. 40. 478 Ibid, pp. 40-41.

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to the dead. Together, the attic space’s higher footing off the grounds, its protective

nature, and its comforting and secure location for gaining knowledge about the

afterworld which Harbart will later describe as a ‘higher nobler space of the dead’,

makes the attic roof a space of self-empowerment for him.

Against this vertical space are the three spaces of the horizontal – the laid out,

everyday space of the external world – which is a space of pain and sorrow for him. It

reminds him of his orphanage, his lack of education, his material failures, his

unfulfilled dreams and desires, his public humiliations. About twenty minutes from

Harbart’s house are the wealthy districts whose street names – Loudon, Rawdon,

Robinson, and Outram – make Harbart feel like a ‘sahib’. Harbart always traverses

this space wearing a long ulster coat, black trousers, and an old tattered hat, and

instantly utters his nonsensical English composition, ‘cat bat water dog fish’.479 He

sometimes visits the Park Street cemetery and the antique glass house, where he can

see the blonde nymph of his dreams, a stone carving of a beautiful girl who reminds

him of his first love Buki, and of the naked Russian woman chased by German soldiers

in a film he watched as a child.480 This space, which is simultaneously local and

international in character, is Harbart’s space of desire and imitation – his clothes, his

activities in and associations with the space transport him to a world of late Victorian

(decadent) culture. This bourgeois space is juxtaposed with the third space of

consumerist violence, with ‘multi-storeyed structures’, new video-renting shops, fast

food stores, new cars, and television.481 Contrasting this uneven world of late-colonial

and the consumerist capitalist space is the relatively poor and old neighbourhood

where Harbart lives, the fourth space – a world of decrepit houses, old buildings,

flashy signboards, tea shops, groceries, whore alleys, portico pillars, lepers on the

pavement, and the smell of smoke and piss – the space.482 This is the space for the

urban poor. It co-exists with the bourgeois-metropolitan spaces, but is mostly unseen

from the cultural and capital centres. It is marginal and cornered – the space wherein

the work-force for the bourgeoisie lives.

479 Ibid, p. 81. I will come back to the utterance ‘cat bat water do fish’ in the next section. 480 Ibid, pp. 90-91. 481 Ibid, p. 55. 482 Ibid, p. 91.

154

Harbart, who has long been bullied and harassed by his neighbours, friends,

and family, and loathes the bourgeois middle classes and the police, separates himself

from this horizontal-external space, and decides to seek power and meaning in the

afterworld. He finds not only empowerment in this act, but also his respect for Binu

who tells him about the revolutionary potential of the afterlife. In an episode about

Harbart’s grief over his orphanage, the narrator says: ‘Of course elections have taken

place a few times. It had made no difference to Harbart. He had never voted. Every

election day, he had simply remained on the attic roof instead of going anywhere. It

had seemed like paying a tribute to Binu. But he didn’t have too many memories of

Binu’.483 There is a suggestion here that, like Binu who stood against bourgeois

consumerism and against the moderate, parliamentarian politics of the Communist

Party, Harbart is a resisting political subject. Note also the nature of narration. Harbart

does not seem to be aware of the political nature of this act. He does it to remember,

condole, and pay respect to his first and only intimate friend, Binu. However, there

does seem to be an affective politicisation here as well, even if Harbart does not

consciously politicise himself unlike Sujata in Mother of 1084. As the final statement

suggests, he does these acts because he only has very few memories of Binu – or,

figuratively, because the Binus of the Naxalite generation have become a distant past

in the rise of consumerism and the Left’s bourgeois politics. This act is the

preservation of Binu’s memory – that Binus will somehow ignite the minds of the

urban poor. Interestingly, this thought also occurs to him on the vertical attic space.

Binu and Naxalism will continue to influence and politicise him without him

consciously knowing. The question of self-empowerment in the vertical space is best

understood in a particular section of the novel where he meets the first member of his

family-lineage, Dhnui, who takes him ‘in the sky’ and ‘shows’ him the whole

genealogy of male descendants and their dissolute and meaningless life, even after

death.484 Harbart looks at them, and then looks down and finds himself to be a small

dot in a small room on the earth with a meaningless future waiting for him after death.

What this scene indicates is that contrary to the three material-horizontal spaces which

inflict physical pain and humiliation on him, the material-irrational world of the

vertical appears to be a space of self-realisation and agency. The vertical space not

483 Ibid, p. 56. 484 Ibid, p. 110.

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only gives meaning to Harbart’s life and living, it also empowers him. He experiences

himself as a human being because he can utilise this space to control the dreams and

aspirations of the bourgeoisie, who seek ablution and penance from their cold pursuit

of material wealth in the supernatural-vertical through talking to the dead, through

receiving messages from him. It is a space that co-exists with the material space, but

is also stationed on a higher and ‘nobler’ plane – a space of higher powers, mercy, and

self-cleansing.

As the novel draws to a close, all these different spaces are juxtaposed during

Harbart’s funeral. Those present include his friends and local admirers who chant his

name in celebration, ‘Long Live Harbart-da!’ (which stands for the carnivalesque

celebrations of the bizarre by the subaltern), the police and the journalists

(representing the rationalist-bureaucratic world of surveillance and reasoning), Satpati

Maarik (the world of capitalist consumerism), and the old obsolescent world of Dhnui

and the other great-grandfathers and parents who watch Harbart’s sad demise (the

ghostly world of dead parents and grandparents, a genealogy that we carry with

ourselves every day whether we admit to ourselves or not). By juxtaposing these

different horizontal and vertical spaces, Bhattacharya appears to suggest that the

everyday of the postcolonial (Indian) metropolitan space is marked by all of them.

These different spaces compete with each other for domination in meaning-making,

but this domination is relative, since the existence of the subordinated or the displaced

is what enables the recognition of domination. This is why when Harbart is frightened

by the Rationalist Association’s challenge and yet declares his innocence, the

suggestion is that not only are the aspects of the non-rational an equally relevant and

referential point of entry to answering critical questions in society, but also that our

society is characterised by different counter-lifeworlds and beliefs. A belief based on

facts and evidence, or one using English as the main language in discussions, or one

doubting every native cultural practice as a form of deception (as done by the

Rationalist Association), is the dominating form of reality in our postcolonial hyper-

rationalised society. It is the same society that harbours dark, puzzling, and

unreasonable elements of communal violence: puzzling because one paradigm of

thought cannot respond convincingly to questions and crises set by the other. As Gyan

Prakash writes, the practice of using science and rationality for producing meaning

and knowledge has genealogical connection with the promotion of science and

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technology in colonial India, particularly in the aftermath of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny,

and with the construction of the Western-educated, ‘rational’ colonised subject: ‘To

be a nation was to be endowed with science which had become the touchstone of

rationality […] the Indian nation-state that came into being in 1947 was deeply

connected to science’s work as a metaphor, to its functioning beyond the boundaries

of the laboratory as a grammar of modern power’.485 But Prakash also shows that

reason, rationality, and the promotion of science did not dismantle and replace

conservative religious, caste, and gender practices. It remained coagulated and coeval

with them, making Indian modernity ‘simultaneously as something altogether new and

unmistakably old, at once undoubtedly modern and purely Indian’.486 This element is

presented in the juxtaposition of spaces I just discussed. At the same time, this is also

why the aspect of explosion in the novel’s end appears to be an important ploy.487 By

allowing Harbart’s body to explode, Bhattacharya keeps the elements of puzzle and

mystery as a trigger of disquiet and unease within ‘rational’ argumentation. He then

forces the responsibility of justification onto the bureaucratic. The police conclude

that the body explodes because Binu, Harbart’s Naxalite nephew, placed dynamite

underneath the bed to hide from the police.488 This appears to be the only ‘rational’

conclusion for the explosion. But we never receive confirmation that this ever

happened. The open-endedness of the novel indicates that the ‘rational’ world, which

an urban educated human subject so overwhelmingly embraces, also has its points of

confusion, dogma, and contingency. This is suggested tellingly with Pranab Ghosh’s

response – ‘Isn’t Harbart urban too?’ – to a member of the Rationalist Association

who compares the ‘country bumpkin’ Harbart to a clever urban trickster.489 This is

then followed by a long silence. Urbanity and modernity are understood to be in the

domain of the ‘rational-pragmatic’. But the domain contains characters such as

Harbart as well. The riddle of Harbart’s discovery of ‘superhuman’ powers, his

suicide, and the explosion of his corpse appear to be the author’s reminder that the

485 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1999), pp. 6-7. 486 Ibid, p. 14. 487 Bhattacharya once stated, ‘I don’t understand writing as a way of offering entertainment. For me,

writing has a deeper alchemy, and there is a risk of explosion there’. See Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’,

in Srestho Galpo, p. 9. 488 Bhattacharya, Harbart, p. 140. 489 Ibid, p. 131.

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postcolonial urban space is historically conjunctural in nature. A hyper-rational, pro-

developmental, and homogenised society will only result in discontent and agitation.

Kāngāl Mālshāt and filth

The conjunctural (irreal) nature of postcolonial urban modernity and aesthetics is more

powerfully articulated in Bhattacharya’s fyataru-choktar-based novel, Kāngāl

Mālshāt (Warcry of the Beggars).490 Fyatarus first appear in a short story, ‘Fyataru’,

in the magazine Proma in 1995 where one of the protagonists, Madan, defines the

fyatarus as lower-class flying humans whose supernatural flight at night creates panic

within the police and the upper-class people. Madan tells D.S., the would-be fyataru:

Not everyone can be a fyataru. One needs proper qualifications. You, for

example, go to big offices, and when the officers don’t meet you, or make you

wait, you just don’t sit there peacefully, do you? – you curse him, stick your

snot vengefully to the handles of the armchairs, scratch and make a hole in the

sofa, tell me, haven’t you done that?

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Damage. Damage whenever you can. You have to keep it in your mind. We

recruit only those who keep that in mind.’491

The fundamental functions of the fyatarus are to bring damage and manufacture fear

through flight. The story ends as the fyatarus, the flying beggars, prostitutes, sweepers,

and crooks attack a midnight party of the refined aristocratic class in a floating hotel

on the river Ganga. Reminiscent of the political tactics of sabotage by industrial

workers, as noted by Timothy Mitchell in Carbon Democracy,492 the fyatarus attack

and sabotage the upper-class bourgeois values of hygiene, sophistication, and aesthetic

beauty with weapons such as brooms, dog shit, rotten food, alcohol bottles, human

excreta, unused flesh, discarded bottles, metals, etc. This sudden attack from above

490 Kāngāl Mālshāt was published in 2003 and soon became a cult novel for its use of unconventional

narrative style and genre, its plot of lower-class militants launching a warfare against the state, and its

coarse, vulgar, parodic language. It is currently being translated into English. A film has already been

made by Suman Mukhopadhyay (2013) to high critical acclaim. I am using the edition published in his

Upanyas Samagro [The Complete Novels of Nabarun Bhattacharya] (Kolkata: Dey’s, 2010), pp. 229-

380. 491 Sanglap 2.1 sup, pp. 136-49 (p. 142). Slightly modified. 492 See the chapter ‘Sabotage’ in Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

(London: Verso, 2011), pp. 144-72.

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(again, note the aspect of verticality as empowerment) using the filthiest of elements

and craziest of laughter unnerves the police as they fail to identify the ‘criminals’.493

Nabarun reintroduces the fyatarus in Kāngāl Mālshāt. This time, fyatarus are

accompanied by another lumpen force called the choktars, whose characters include

Bhodi, Nalen, Sorkhel, and Bechamoni. They are sorcerers who practise black magic

and live in the shanty towns and slums. They offer shelter to those who may be

interested in the activities of witchcraft, sorcery, the ‘game of pillow-exchange’

(political negotiations), etc.494 They have a leader, a huge ancient raven who has been

living ‘from time immemorial’, who holds ‘world history in his right fist’, and who,

together with the ghosts of a fat English woman from eighteenth-century colonial

Bengal named Begum Johnson, and of a major general from the army, is plotting

warfare against the state. They want to teach the state a lesson using irreal guerrilla

warfare because the state has neither listened to their demands nor allowed them their

civil and political rights (the nature of these rights is not clear in the narrative). Their

intention is not to kill the opponent, but to shoot discarded, filthy, and abominable

objects at it and to defile public space. In their militant spirit, unlawful activities,

armed struggles against the state, and vulgar and coarse language, they are, as

Bhattacharya’s middle-class narrators and characters derogatorily call them, the

‘lumpens’. Having been neglected and exploited over the years by the consumerist

state, they have decided to mobilise their powers of the fantastic and the supernatural

to practise their mysterious form of guerrilla warfare. My discussion here remains

limited to the use of filth and filth-making in the novel, which I argue shares some

connection with Naxalite politics and also reflects on the contemporary socio-

economic and political contexts.

There is an astonishing preoccupation with filth and dirt in the novel.495 Filth

is not just used as an object of attack by the lumpen class, but also as a mode of

493 Bhattacharya, ‘Fyataru’, pp. 151-59. 494 Bhattacharya, Kangal, p. 245. 495 There have been Bakhtinian readings on this novel, especially through the lens of the carnivalesque.

But I think Bakhtin’s category does not allow as broad and historical an engagement with the aspect of

filth and class as I plan to stage here. For a reading of the carnivalesque in Bhattacharya, see Tapodhir

Bhattacharya, ‘Carnivaler Bisforon’ [‘The Explosion of Carnival’], Aksharekha, 1.1 (2008), 140-48;

Aritra Chakraborti, ‘Reading and Resistance in the Works of Nabarun Bhattacharya’, Sanglap: Journal

of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 2.1 Sup (2015), 16-32; Dibyakusum Ray, ‘Biplab, Pratirodh, Bichitra

– Nabarun Bhattacharyaer Antorpath’ [‘Revolution, Resistance, Bizarre – An Intellectual Reading of

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critique. Consider for instance the passage in the beginning of the novel, when Barilal,

a lower-middle-class figure who will go on to be the sole witness to the fyataru-choktar

entente against the state, visits Keonratala (a burning ghat or crematorium on the edge

of river Ganga) to ‘study human form’ and discovers the desecrated busts of noted

cultural icons:

Sir Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay. Alas, the Royal Bengal Tiger! Alas, Calcutta

University! Alas, Calcutta Municipal Corporation! What a pathetic state his

memorial is in! Filthy, colourless, cracked in parts, littered with bird shit […]

opposite his is the bust of Rajendranath Mukhopadhyay. His case appears even

sadder. The smokers of weed, the vandals have stolen the expensive chains

around his neck and made large cracks on his face. If it has any basis, the

respected Sri Subalchandra Mitra is told to have stated these words about him:

‘No Bengali has the name and prestige equal to his amongst the white business

classes.’ Let alone the whites or the lord and ladies, not even the black lumpen

natives seem to give him a damn […] Barilal had to cancel his plans of turning

further left because the place was littered with puke, moss, and shit […] he

stood before Saratchandra [Chattopadhyay]’s memorial bust. This is the

current status of our Bengali race and literature. Had there not been a protective

grille around Saratchandra’s dirty bust, someone would have beheaded him

and fled off with the bust. As it has happened with some. There seems to be no

end to this negligence, this insult, and this humiliation.496

Like Barilal, the educators, cultural reformers, and writers mentioned throughout this

passage – including Rabindranath Tagore and Rammohan Roy – belonged to the

middle or upper middle class.497 They worked to better the socio-economic and

cultural conditions of their class, but their works gradually turned into acts of

solidifying class and caste boundaries and a popularisation of Hindu nationalism. In

the postcolonial period, these reformers were declared cultural icons by the state.

Although many of these busts belong to anti-colonial militant nationalists, these are

meant only to be admired and worshipped and not to be followed. In the current

consumerist state, they have, ironically, along with their fellow cultural reformers,

come to stand for cultural prestige and the establishment, as iconic pointers to a rich

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Works’], in ‘Molotov Cocktail’, Aihik (2016)

<http://www.aihik.in/aihik/Article/524_.html> [accessed 23 Jan, 2017]. 496 Bhattacharya, Kangal, pp. 237-39. 497 Though Barilal is from the lower middle class, his critical views reconfirm how similar class-driven

perceptions shape identity and value across the hierarchy of the middle classes.

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historical past – empty symbols of pride and power for a middle class that is itself

ideologically bankrupt. This aspect of desecrating the busts of cultural reformers has

a direct link with urban Naxalite politics. As we mentioned in the introductory sections

of this chapter, being utterly frustrated with the existing socio-economic system, the

meaninglessness of education, the perennial condition of joblessness, bureaucratic

laziness, nepotism and corruption, the student/Naxalites in mid-60s Calcutta began to

express their discontent by breaking chairs and tables in the classroom, tearing

university examination answer scripts or their degree certificates after convocations,

and, indeed, smashing, defiling, blackening the statues and busts of icons like

Rammohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, Mahatma

Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore.498 The Naxalites called for a ‘cultural revolution’

that would take into account the contributions of the lower classes and castes to the

making of our history and culture, the people who question and challenge bourgeois

dominance in governance and the cultures of corruption and complacency, and the

texts that tell us why the people on the margins, the peasants and the urban poor, have

to continue to suffer socio-economically in the postcolonial period – in short, a

restructuring of cultural values based on the demands and politics of the vulnerable

classes.499 In the current example of bust desecration in the burning ghat, there is a

strong suggestion of a similar class-based hatred and anger. This suggestion is

corroborated by the fact that Barilal also finds in his survey a number of busts, mostly

belonging to sadhus (outcaste saints and fakirs), that are kept intact. The suggestion is

that since most of the daily population of this ghat is from the lower classes and lower

castes working in the area and the sadhus who come to smoke weed, they find a critical

solidarity with these busts and figures – these busts are their cultural leaders and

motivators. Filth then appears to carry a specific class-based critique in the novel. Let

me tease out the meaning and function of filth more specifically through literary-

anthropological and historical readings.

In her classic study of dirt and pollution, Mary Douglas writes that nothing is

inherently dirty: dirt is a ‘matter out of place’.500 A thing assumes the connotation of

dirt by being in the wrong place in a society’s understanding of social order. What is

498 Banerjee, p. 181; Dasgupta pp. 71-75. 499 Banerjee, pp. 176-86. 500 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London:

Routledge, 1966), p. 53.

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dirty and filthy is in fact cultural and structural in orientation. Building upon these

observations, Dominique Laporte argues that as humans evolve and social

arrangements develop, human excrement and its attendant sensors, sight and smell,

come to be understood as filthy, shameful, and private.501 This development, during

the long industrial drive in Victorian England, established the parameters of culture

and prestige, and intensified the class-based meanings of pollution and filth through

the fictional and non-fictional renderings and stereotyping of the ‘filthy’ working

classes.502 Natalka Freeland tells us that the utopian science fiction in the Victorian

period by H. G. Wells and others repeatedly focused on the overt presence of the urban

poor and filth in Victorian London and Paris, appearing at times as instructive manuals

for waste management.503 Thus, the production and management of filth also appear

to be one of the unmentionable aspects about modernity itself. However, filth was not

only registered to render and intensify class stereotypes. As Peter Stallybrass and

Allon White note, nineteenth-century fictional comparisons of the lumpenproletariat

and the urban poor with pigs and swine in terms of cleanliness suggest a trans-coding

of values: something that is filthy or peripheral is also often symbolically social.504

Elements that the society discards as filthy and dirty are those that also inversely

constitute the society and its culture. The word ‘filthy’ in such readings gains a

political meaning. Many writers use the transgressive, creative fecundity of the

category of the filthy to register their protests against the overwhelming drive for order

and rigidity in society and in representation. To follow William Cohen’s words, ‘When

people who understand themselves to be degraded or abjected by a dominant order

adopt, appropriate and sometimes even celebrate what is otherwise castigated as filth,

there is a possibility of revaluing filth while partially preserving its abrasiveness’. He

adds, ‘Not merely owning up to, but taking comfort in, one’s filth, one’s own supposed

501 Dominic Laporte, History of Shit, trans. by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe El-Khoury (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. viii. 502 William Cohen writes: ‘the spread of contagious diseases, most notoriously cholera – associated

with overcrowding and poor sanitation made the filth of urban slums still more terrifying, both for their

inhabitants and for the middle class observers’. See Cohen, ‘Introduction: Locating Filth’, in Filth: Dirt,

Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. by William Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. vii-xxxvii, (p. xix). 503 Natalka Freeland, ‘The Dustbin of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias’ in Filth,

ed. by William Cohen and Ryan Johnson, pp. 225-49, (p. 225). 504 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1986), p. 45.

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dirtiness can serve powerful purposes of self-formation and group identification. In

these sense, filth is put to important use, both psychologically and politically’.505

This reading of filth as social and structural critique appears particularly

relevant for this novel. When Bhattacharya began to write Harbart and the fyataru

stories, the Left Front government in West Bengal had started its campaign of

removing street-side hawkers from public spaces. Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay tells us

that between November 1996 and December 1997, the Calcutta Municipal

Corporation carried out the ‘Operation Sunshine’ campaign which ‘evicted thousands

of street side stalls to make the enlisted intersections congestion free’.506 This step was

taken to ‘aggressively remake the city as a “world class” urban environment’.507 The

hawkers, however, did not succumb to the campaign. Several hawkers’ organisations,

along with various NGOs, contested the campaign, and in 2005 received a court

verdict that allowed them to work in designated spaces of the city. The contestation

and the compromise between the state and the hawkers on filth-making and cleaning

spaces appear to have a strong resonance in Kāngāl Mālshāt. Choktars and fyatarus

initiate war because the Communist ministers and the industrialists of the city have

decided to clean and decorate the city to court multinational investment. The police

have been ordered to demolish slums and remove street hawking. The narrative begins

as a few policemen see a bunch of skeletal heads dancing on the water in a

crematorium. The narrator suggests farcically that this is a warning not ‘to kick the

butts’ of the lower classes, because the latter can take recourse to a range of activities

and practices that the instrumentally rational bureaucracy ‘can hardly understand’.508

On many occasions, the leader of the fyataru-choktar entente, known as the raven,

talks about the evil nexus between the Communist leaders, industrialists and police in

the postcolonial state. In a long section, the raven raises issues such as the problems

of capitalism (that the world is run by the World Bank); the political importance of the

early Communist activities in Bengal and, in a wider context, in 1930s and 40s Soviet

Russia; corruption in postcolonial societies; the importance of guerrilla and armed

warfare; and the way the Communists in Bengal have become a caricature of what

505 Cohen, ‘Locating’, pp. x-xi. 506 Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, ‘Politics of Archiving: Hawkers and Pavement Dwellers in Calcutta’,

Dialectical Anthropology, 35.3 (2011), 295-311 (p. 302). 507 Ibid, p. 307. 508 We can recall here what the Comaroffs said about ‘zombie-labour’.

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Marx and Engels or Charu Mazumdar had in mind.509 The choktars threaten the local

police that if they do not ask the higher powers to stop, then ‘we will piss on your face,

release a sea of shit and piss on your clean streets and decorated palaces, and shove

our shit up into your arses’.510 On another occasion, the head of the choktar group,

Bhodi, in a meeting with politicians and industrialists in the Bengal Chamber of

Commerce, states that if the Communists do not buy AK-47s from them, they would

make them ‘eat shit’.511 In the imagery of ‘eating shit’, there is a strong casteist

counter-reference. Although it is not clear what their jobs are, throughout the narrative

Bhodi, Sorkhel, Nolen and the choktars appear mostly as sweepers, sewage cleaners,

or helpers at the crematorium, confronting, handling, and living with shit, piss, filthy

water, corpses, rotten objects, and excreta. The caste hierarchy in India, generated and

maintained by the Brahmins, the upper castes, and the privileged classes, has

consigned the caste-bound roles of menial and scavenging jobs to a fraction of people

who are then identified as the Untouchables, the lowest in the caste ladder.512 They

are loathed so much by the middle classes that the phrase ‘eat shit’ has come to stand

for a slang which derives its power of insult from its lower caste association.513 When

the lower-caste choktars use the term, however, there is a strong suggestion that if they

are regarded as the shit-eating castes and classes, and thus reduced to being

untouchable and filthy, they will use that filthiness to confront the upper castes and

classes: making the latter eat shit, bringing them down to the literal bottom of filth and

lowliness, and exposing and insulting their preservation of cleanliness and hygiene.514

509 Bhattacharya, Kangal, pp. 334-59. 510 Ibid, p. 358. 511 Ibid, p. 347. 512 For an analysis, see B. R. Ambedkar, The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar, ed. by Valerian

Rodrigues (New Deli: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 351-406; Eleanor Zelliot, From Untouchable

to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001). For a notable fictional

representation, see Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1940). For literary

criticism on the Untouchable fictions, see Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions: Literary

Realism and the Crisis of Caste (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 513 Bhattacharya’s use of the sensational-pulp fiction format in the novel, which I will discuss shortly

hereafter, makes me wonder if the ‘eat shit’ reference is related to the popular American insult.

This attack also evokes the powerful caste-based literary critiques that Dalit writers have been

expressing in their work. For instance, Baburao Bagul’s Aghori (1980) is about a lower-caste ‘goddess’

(the Goddess of filth) who has suddenly encroached the ‘clean’ precincts of an upper-caste house. The

narrative dramatises the anxiety and fear towards the invisible and filthy nature of the Goddess

(suggesting the simultaneity of the invisibilisation and necessity of the Dalit castes for the upper castes). 514 One can also think of Om Prakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan, where he speaks about the

violent history and painful meaning of cleanliness and filth for the Dalits. See Om Prakash Valmiki,

Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, trans. by Arun Prabha Mukherjee (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2008). See also the poems of Marathi Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal, especially the collection

Golpitha (1973). Dilip Chitre has translated his poems; see Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underground:

164

As the political heads and businessmen discount their warnings, they first release their

specially-manufactured UFOs, which decapitate but do not kill, and then they fly up

and perch on rooftops and attack the police on the ground with the filthiest of objects,

including human and dog shit, horse piss, rotten flesh, broken brooms and baskets,

and mossy earthen pots. That these objects are shot from a ‘penis-cannon’ built in the

Portuguese era corroborates a dimension of resistance through the suggestion of class

inversion – the subaltern classes are using colonial devices to attack the colonially-

minded state through the postcolonial weapon of filth. Bhattacharya seems to suggest

here that the abundance of filth in a postcolonial metropolis reflects the failure in

sewage and urban planning, and in the suitable rehabilitation of the city’s urban poor.

A colonial industrial city like Calcutta is bound to have a large population of poor

people, which is a reminder of the city’s historical past, its labour practices, and its

particular kind of evolution in culture, class, and status.515 A coercive repression of

filth and ‘filthy’ humans will only end in the return of the repressed.516 Through the

Poems 1972-2006 (New Delhi: Navayana, 2007). Basudev Sunani, an Odiya Dalit poet, expresses the

question of cleanliness and filth powerfully in a poem titled ‘Body Purification’: ‘If you can, but once,

| fix a bone in your tongue, | stand firm on the ground | and ask yourself: | Which Ganges can clean |

my shit-smeared body? | How many stacks | of tulsi leaves | will sanctify me? | How many tons of sandal

paste | will deodorize my body? | How do I look | when I clean your sewer tank | taking out bucket load

| of faeces floating | on the water used | for cleaning your bottoms? | How do I look | when I swim

breathless | on the water flowing | straight out of your latrines | to clean the sewer depths? | What do I

look like when I pick up | the maggot infested mangy dog | to clean the street | so that your car | can

have a smooth drive? | Once | just one time | guide the pupils of your eyes | towards the sun | and look

at me, | and then only can you measure | what strength you carry | in your sinews. | Wherever I am | the

place reeks of bad odour. | Your nose snivels; | your mouth retches | your eyes squirm. | But when I’m

sick for a day, | your streets stay unswept; | the latrines choke; | hospitals groan | as patients go on

rampage. | Ask your grey cells | but once to explain | what Smriti, Purana, | Intelligence, Education

mean. | I’m the one who handles shit | and eats his rice | with the same fingers | and I’m the one | who

knows the difference | between shit and rich | yet, I don’t know | What Smriti, Purana, | Intelligence and

Education are. | I’ve seen it all – | Worms excreted from your innards, | snot and drivel | Thrown up

from your mouth, | Blood congealing | On your death bed. | You may scoff and sneer at me | but when

I’m not around, | I know you have | a mental breakdown. | Fix a bone in your tongue | and tell me for

once – | how much Ganges, tulsi | and sandal are needed | to purify and sanctify | my shit-smeared

body’. See Basudev Sunani, ‘Body Purification’, trans. by JP Das, in the special issues

‘Dalit/Indigenous Australian’, ed. by Mridula Nath Chakraborty and Kent MacCarter, Cordite Poetry

Review, 55.1 (2016) <http://cordite.org.au/poetry/dalit-indigenous/body-purification/> [accessed 25

Jan, 2017]. 515 For a historical reading and further analysis on the aspect of militant nationalism from the urban

poor, see Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India

(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2001); especially pp. 27-64, pp. 143-364. In another novel

titled Lubdhak, based on the removal of dogs from the streets of Calcutta, Nabarun’s narrator says: ‘the

megacity that is beautifying itself in the new millennium in the manner of a gigantic female monster

has no room for the dogs’. Lubdhak ends with a voluntary decision of mass-exodus by the dogs and a

hint that a disaster is imminent for the city. See Bhattacharya, ‘Lubdhak’, in Upanays Samagra

(Kolkata: Dey’s, 2010), pp. 381-423. 516 As Sudipta Kaviraj writes in an essay, many of the refugees in the Partition of Bengal in 1947 took

shelter in municipal parks and state-maintained public places and started using those spaces for personal

and livelihood purposes, even though they were looked down upon by the middle and upper classes for

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use of filth, then, Bhattacharya virulently critiques the shameful disposal of the

integral elements of postcolonial society in order to accommodate multinational

capitalism. He also condemns the practice of invisibilising and removing slums from

the streets for their disorderly and filthy appearance, and exposes the political and

ideological bankruptcy of the Communist leaders – a bankruptcy which contributed

largely to the birth of urban Naxalite politics. The smashing and desecrating of idols,

done mostly by the lower classes and the ‘tantric sadhus’ (saints) who come to the

crematorium for marijuana suggest a hatred towards the cultural prestige of the

Bengali middle classes. The class, together with its mouthpiece, the CPI (M), has

never sympathised with the conditions of the lower classes and castes. To remember

Bashai’s words, Bengali politics is a politics of babu classes and castes catering to

babu interests. Since the lower class cannot desecrate the icons of cultural

conservatism in the babu-owned public spaces, the crematorium or the slums are used

for displaying anger and hatred and for hatching plots of insurgency. Thus, the use of

filth appears strategic and ‘transgressive’ in the novel. As the war continues, filth piles

up on the streets, in the police stations, in the offices and houses of the Communist

leaders. People are choked with the odour, pushing the government and its repressive

forces to finally stop fighting and declare truce.

If filth is used as a mode of social critique, Bhattacharya brings the critique

also into the text’s form and structure through the use of the filthy genre of sensation

fiction. Kāngāl Mālshāt is written in a sensational-serial mode. The chapters are

chronologically narrated, and the narrator resumes every chapter where it ended last.

Each chapter ends with a puzzle or a quote from an ancient or a remotely-known

their disorderly and irreverent nature. They made filth in those spaces with an explicit suggestion that

they owned the space and that the middle classes were not welcome there: ‘Filth and disorder, one

might suspect, acted as a real barrier erected by the people inside, the new inhabitants of the Calcutta

parks, to symbolically establish their control over that space. Since their tolerance of garbage was much

greater than the upper-middle-class groups, the filth itself marked their making the place their own, a

declaration to the middle classes of their unwelcomeness’. See Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere:

Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture 10.1 (1997), 83-117, (p. 107). In

Bhattacharya’s fiction, the fyatarus and choktars appear to use the filthy spaces they inhabit with an

ironic self-satisfaction because they can carry out their dubious activities without state surveillance.

Later they expand their occupation of urban space through the battle with the state, where they shoot

discarded and excremental objects on the streets. Their occupation of the urban space through filth-

making is a declaration to the state that if their demands are not met, they will damage and destroy the

artificial and coercive manufacturing of beauty and cleanliness of the postcolonial Third World urban

society. This act of filth-making is also a reminder to the middle class that their objects of disgust and

loathing may return to them – be it filth or the filthy subaltern classes: If the middle class and the state

push the urban poor to filthy corners, the latter will use that filth to attack and expose the politics of

repression and hatred.

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writer-scholar from Bengal or from the wider literary traditions of India, which the

narrator then picks up in the next chapter and uses to mock the current readers’

negligence of Indian literature.517 For instance, the second chapter ends with a

description of Bhodi’s dilapidated house in a slum and a signboard which says, ‘the

house is given to rent for inauspicious activities’. This is then followed by the quote

‘yonder is the thing yawning which has no name’, taken from Girindrasekhar Bose’s

Lal Kalo.518 Bhattacharya seems to use this technique to keep the readership drawn to

the text. As Andrew King tells us, with the rapid rise of readership in the servant and

lower classes, Victorian England saw a tremendous rise in popular serial fiction, most

notably Edward Lloyd’s Penny Dreadful series. These series not only mixed a number

of popular sensational genres, such as sentimental fiction, romantic comedy, tragic

romance, and melodrama, but also employ several textual strategies such as episodic

climaxes, quizzing, astrological details, or strange pictures at the end of a chapter to

keep the readership drawn to the narrative.519 But Bhattacharya’s deployment of this

technique here in a non-serialised novel is to exploit the satirical nature of the serial-

sensational fiction. Consider the narration at the beginning of the third chapter:

No child reads ‘Lal Kalo’ these days. So no one seems to have any interest in

asking what could open its mouth in the dark so wide that it made a bizarre-

looking, gigantic executioner sweat in horror. Girindrasekhar [Bose] has been

exiled from dream-world to slumber-world. As are exiled those known and not

so known literary figures of Dakkhinaranjan [Mitra Majumdar], Dhan Gopal

[Mukerji], Hemendrakumar [Roy], Sunirmal [Basu], Khagendranath [Mitra],

and Shukhalata [Rao] who used to write for children. Today is the time of

litterateur-children rather than children’s writer. Children read only Feluda or

Tintin these days. Their parents are also dumb. They force so much of high

protein, Brenolia, broiler chicken, and Kellogg’s cornflakes into their

children’s brains that these children become weak and effeminate. After these,

they tend to learn either computer or dissolution. The offspring of the Big Bong

are totally ignorant of the funny teen-characters of Handa-Bhonda, Nonte-

Fonte, Batul, the Great, and even Chenga-Benga too. Nowhere in the world is

a child so selfish and streetsmart as the Bengali children. Look, for example,

the children from our neighbouring country, Bihar. Or of Nepal. One can spot

many honest and simple children there. Always. Anyway, back to Barilal.520

517 This technique is also present in Harbart, though without the biting attack on the reading public. 518 Bhattacharya, Kangal, p. 241. 519 Andrew King, ‘Literature of the Kitchen: Cheap Serial Fiction of the 1840s and 1850s’, in A

Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Pamela Gilbert (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), pp. 38-

53. 520 Bhattacharya, Kangal, p. 241.

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The narrator is deeply critical of the Bengali middle class and its ignorance in India’s

literary traditions, namely, sensational fiction and children’s literature. But this

criticality, unlike Devi’s narrators, is not expressed in a formal style or in a serious

and sober use of language. Rather, the tone is cavalier, frank, and often dismissive.

There is a sense of parody in the phrase ‘litterateur-children’, as the texts of Feluda

and Tintin refer to a world of logic, detection, rationality, and globalised consumerism,

as opposed to fantasy, wonder, and excitement in the supernatural in the works of the

children’s writers. The statement of Bengali children being ‘weak and effeminate’ also

carries a clear abuse of gender. What is notable is that Bhattacharya does not cover up

for his narrator’s language or politics, but rather presents it as it is, which I will argue

reflects the author’s class-based resistant ideology. The narrator here appears to be

from the educated lower class, who knows how the knowledge and culture of the

middle class is baseless, how the middle class decorously follows Victorian morality

and political correctness, and how the middle class has a habit of attaching derogatory

meanings to everything popular. Such a narrator reminds us of the Battala

sensationalist fictions in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Battala fictions published works

such as cheap religious books, handbooks, manuals, pornographic fiction, slapstick

comedy, unauthorised translation of English canonical works, sensationalist fiction,

and whatever would sell to a lower-class readership. It was a highly popular genre and

was loathed by the middle class for its lack of literary quality, its frank treatment of

sex, and the eccentric use of moral values.521 As recent scholars have shown, this

genre, because of its critical and parodic nature, was highly intertextual and subversive

in style and form, where the entrenchment of class and caste values and the lessons

learnt from the bureaucratic colonial education were widely derided and

lampooned.522 Bhattacharya appears to revisit the genre of the Battala sensationalist

fictions in order to give voice to his subaltern and lower-class protagonists. Unlike the

dignified protagonists in Maxim Gorky’s socialist realism or in Premchand’s social

realism, Bhattacharya’s protagonists are subalterns and outcastes. They are from the

lowest rungs of the social order, historically known as the dangerous class or the

521 See Anindita Ghosh, ‘The Battala Book Market’, in Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the

Politics of Language of Culture in A Colonial Society, 1778-1905 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2006) pp. 107-51. 522 See Ghosh; also, Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural

Nationalism (London: Hurst, 2001), pp. 65-67; more specifically, see Goutam Bhadra, Nyara Battolay

Jay Kawbar [How Many Times the Baldie Visits Battala] (Kolkata: Chhatim, 2011).

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lumpenproletariat. The ‘lumpens’ either take the form of Harbart to declare their

power and presence through the means of the weird (the site of a class alliance between

the lumpenproletariat and the marginal babu classes), or they become fyatarus and

choktars to mimic the higher classes, to use vulgar language, to expose the hypocrisies

of these classes, and to employ a militant guerrilla warfare which they have learnt

from their native cultural practices and their association with the Naxalite ranks. In

order to represent this politics and practice, Bhattacharya uses a realist mode that

avoids the route of social realist proletarian struggle, and mingles marginality,

violence, class struggle, parody, horror, supernaturalism, militancy, and social

criticism together to establish a realism of a sensationalist genre.523 The question is

not whether such a warfare is possible in reality. Many of the guerrilla warfares

challenge what is pragmatically possible. The point is to understand the hatred that the

subaltern classes hold for the higher classes, a hatred that does not only include anger

and rage but laughter and parody as well, because imitating the bourgeoisie and

laughing at its life and culture is also part of the expression of discontent. Like the

narrator of the Battala fictions who often enters the narrative and uses a coarse and

vulgar language to air his opinions against the middle class and to make a contact with

the readership for a rendering of ‘realism’ in fiction, Bhattacharya’s narrator also

interrupts with his own social commentary on the consumerism-minded implied

readership. These narratorial interruptions are an indication that literature is not an

uncritical, undisrupted mediation of social reality. It is a critical tool for creating social

consciousness about the way a narrative is written, about how social criticisms are

made through narratives, and how narratives are intimately associated with social

norms. If Battala fictions use the so-called lowly ways of looking at the world, such

lowly ways are a condition of being manufactured by the middle and upper classes

through their subjection of the lower classes and their labour. Through this form,

Bhattacharya appears to restore the filthy fictional mode of social criticism and

suggests that the realistic representation of reality is a construct, produced by a

particular employment of particular fictional tools. The meaning or value attached to

the realistic representation of reality is thoroughly class-based.

523 For a discussion on realism’s debt to sensation fiction, see Daniel Brown, ‘Realism and Sensation

Fiction’, in Sensation Fiction, ed. by Gilbert, pp. 94-106. Brown writes: ‘Sensation fiction is one genre

in which the Gothic is thought to mix with realism in ways that also threatened to undermine realist

rationalism’ (p. 101).

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Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha writes, ‘When the elitist cult of the writer is

being valorised and appropriated by the ideology of the market, Nabarun’s prose has

foregrounded the dissident avatar of the writer whose sole objective is to unmask the

process of shameless reification of the world’.524 Nabarun Bhattacharya’s later

writings have taken up a critical irrealist form to expose and criticise virulently how

postcolonial urban life is reified, and how advanced forms of capitalism have shattered

the prospects of ideological struggles by the urban/elite as well as by the proletarian

sections. As a Marxist, however, he has continued to believe that if the (urban)

revolution comes, it will come from the lowest section of society which suffers the

most in the current consumerist dispensation – the lumpenproletariat, the Dalits, the

outcastes, the women, and the underprivileged, people like Harbart and fyatarus and

choktars. It may not take the orthodox Communist form of struggle, but may bend

towards guerrilla warfare or anarchic insurgency, and add elements that are

conventionally understood as ‘irrational’, local, impractical, and baseless. But there

will certainly be a unified struggle from below, from those who are under the yoke.

This political faith has never mitigated from Bhattacharya’s literary imagination. In a

story ‘Steamroller’, published in the early 1970s, a poor, old, and angry steamroller-

driver appears to smash the beautiful cars and sophisticated glass buildings of the

bourgeoisie into pieces, compelling the police to frighteningly declare that ‘the

revolution has begun’.525 Another story, ‘Prithibir Sesh Communist’ (‘World’s Last

Communist’), published in 2007, ends with these evocative and confident lines: ‘The

Communists will come back from every part of the world. Yes. They will. But for that,

each and every minute and hour of the next seventeen years has to be utilized well.

The Communists will return all over the world. They have to. And the world will

shake, not for ten days this time, but for ten thousand years.’526 There is as much anger

and rage here against bourgeois-consumerist life and capitalist oppression in the

postcolonial world as there is sympathy for the oppressed and hope for a socialist

future. Writing in the post-Naxalism period and trying to capture the entrenchment of

class and caste, Bhattacharya’s urban fantastic mode registers both the historical

524 Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha, ‘Fyatarus and Subaltern War Cries: Nabarun Bhattacharya and the

Rebirth of the Subject’, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 1.2 (2015), 90-102. (pp. 91-

92). 525 ‘Streamroller’ in Bhattacharya, Srestho Galpo, pp. 25-28. 526 ‘World’s Last Communist’, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 2.1 (2015) 150-55

(p. 154).

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specificity of the period, the global factors such as liberalisation and multinational

capitalism responsible for the specific shaping of the period as such, and the

possibilities and hope of a Naxal guerrilla resistance from the urban poor.

This is the same hope with which Mahasweta Devi ends Operation? Bashai

Tudu – to return to her one last time – a hope for an emancipated future, which the

Naxalbari movement sought through a unified struggle by the peasants, workers, and

students, and through the annihilation of the oppressive elements from society. The

state could destroy the movement’s base, but it could not put out the flames of peasant

struggle and insurgency. As Bashai states, as long as the peasant and the peripheral

subjects are socio-economically oppressed, they will continue to take up arms and

fight. Devi situates this endless nature of fight through the absent presence of Brati

and Bashai, and through the affective/argumentative politicisation of Sujata and Kali.

She corroborates this nature in the use of the quest mode constituted primarily of the

elements of non-linear time, the interventionist and critical nature of narration, and the

dialectic between the rational and the fantastic. This mode allows Devi to give these

peripheral/critical subjects the ability and the strength to fracture the dominant

perspectives, and to gain political subjectivity and voice. I have argued that these

modes, whose productions are conditioned by their specific historical conjunctures

and international historical and political determinants, and which challenge and

expand the contours of realism through their dialectical and critical use of the rational

and the non-rational, constitute the framework of critical irrealism in the postcolonial

Indian context.

In the last two chapters, we have seen how the catastrophic conjunctures of

famine and starvation compel socially committed and non-conforming authors to

employ analytical-affective and metafictional modes in their writing, while political

uprisings and post-movement conditions call for the modes of quest and urban fantasy.

As we now turn to the final chapter on the declaration of internal emergency in India,

we will read a range of realist modes that the authors have taken up to understand the

anxious negotiations of democracy and authoritarianism in the postcolonial aftermath.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Writing the Indian Emergency: Realisms Without, Above,

and Below

In the early hours of 26 June, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi stunned the nation

by proclaiming a state of emergency in India. The surprise soon turned into fear and

anxiety as hundreds of Opposition leaders and members were arrested on the same

day under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). During the following

months, around 111,000 people were detained under the MISA. Press-gagging

measures were put in place. The Press Council turned into an agency for government

propaganda. Constitutional reform was carried out to reduce the power of the

Parliament and to smother all dissent. These developments were then followed by

what is commonly known as the ‘excesses’ of the emergency: mass sterilisation and

slum clearance programmes.527 Nineteen months later, on 18 January, 1977, in an

equally dramatic and sudden fashion, Gandhi dissolved the Lok Sabha – the lower

house of the Parliament – and declared that fresh elections would be conducted in the

following March. In these elections, for the first time in post-independence India, the

Congress Party would be electorally defeated. The period between 1975 and 1977,

known as the Indian Emergency, has puzzled critics and invited wide scholarly

attention on the question of democracy and authoritarianism in postcolonial India.528

This chapter will discuss how the economic and political crises of the period led to the

527 See Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (Delhi: Penguin,

2003), pp. 159-69, pp. 203-09. 528 Apart from Chandra, on this question and on the general studies of the emergency, see Partha

Chatterjee, A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),

pp. 35-57; Ranajit Guha, ‘Indian Democracy’, pp. 39-53; Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories:

Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Vernon Hewitt,

Political Mobilisation and Democracy in India: States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2008);

Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class’, Modern Asian

Studies, 45.5 (2011), 1003–49; Mary E. John, ‘The Emergency in India: Some Reflections on the

Legibility of the Political’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 15.4 (2014), 625-37; Patrick Clibbens, ‘The

Destiny of this City is to be the Spiritual Workshop of the Nation: Clearing Cities and Making Citizens

during the Indian Emergency, 1975-1977’, Contemporary South Asia 22.1 (2014), 51-66; and, Rebecca

Williams, ‘Storming the Citadels of Poverty: Family Planning under the Emergency in India, 1975-

1977’, Journal of Asian Studies, 73.2 (2014), 471-92.

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catastrophic conjuncture of constitutional emergency, and how novelists have

approached the issue and represented Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian regime.

The emergency is portrayed in the novels of Salman Rushdie, Nayantara

Sahgal, Arun Joshi, O. V. Vijayan, and Rohinton Mistry as a mechanism for autocracy

and personal profit, with depictions of a powerful and mysterious high command, a

corrupt bureaucracy, and the infliction of suffering on the public from above. In many

of the novels, Gandhi’s character is not presented in person, but is understood as a

grand, mysterious, larger-than-life force that controls the lives of people from outside.

Her mammoth and evil power is concretised through the severe adverse effects that

her emergency measures have on the poor and the weak. The novels situate the

emergency primarily within the realist discourses of class struggle, caste

consciousness, and bodily oppression, but the writers also employ a number of

aesthetic modes to meaningfully engage with the puzzle and crisis of the period.

Sahgal, for instance, focuses mainly on the elite and ruling classes and their corrupt

politics in the postcolonial aftermath; her narrator and protagonists see the world of

the emergency from the top and ignore the damage being inflicted on the lower classes.

On the other hand, Rohinton Mistry reverses the angle and highlights the suffering of

the lower castes, lower classes, and marginal communities during the period. The

aesthetic modes used by the two novelists, inflected by their focus on class, caste, and

marginal communities, could be seen as a realism from above and from below,

respectively. In Rushdie, Joshi, and Vijayan, Gandhi and her emergency appear

allegorically. In order to represent and to criticise the brutality of the regime and the

corrupt neo-colonialist politics of the government, these writers exploit the resources

of the body through the modes of magic, myth, and the grotesque that both challenge

realism’s rational logic and reconstruct its framework. I call this framework extra-

realism or a realism from without, which I will show is different from that of critical

irrealism. The chapter will discuss more broadly this social-spatial use of realism in

emergency narratives. Contrary to critics’ claims that there were few contemporary

‘oppositional’ narratives that ‘truly’ represented the emergency and its measures, I

argue that the creative literature of the period gives us powerful evidence of how the

emergency was understood, analysed, criticised, and resisted through fiction. In

addition, through an experimental use of form and mode, these novels also

demonstrate their investigative as well as instructive prowess, exposing the powers

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that obscure and mystify knowledge productions, and pointing to the constructed

nature of ‘truth claims’ in official representations and discourses.

The Emergency: Authoritarianism, Violence, and Representation

Historian Bipan Chandra tells us that the emergency was mainly a ‘narrative’ of ‘two

characters’: Indira Gandhi and Jayprakash Narayan.529 Narayan, popularly known as

JP, alleged that the Congress Party was corrupt and unable to tackle the issues of

inflation, poverty, and unemployment, and was in effect assaulting the hard-fought

and cherished institutions of democracy. On the other hand, Indira Gandhi continued

to speak of the need to ‘preserve and safeguard democracy’ from the ‘evil forces of

destruction’, which for her stood for the oppositional voices in India and foreign

conspiracies against her government.530 Both were using democracy as a medium or

as a ruse in their fight against each other. Rather than simply being personality clashes,

this fight however has a long and disturbing socio-economic and political context. The

1960s, as noted in the previous chapter, saw terrible conditions for food and

agricultural production. Drought, crop failures, lack of government support, food riots,

and famine not only debilitated the country’s economy, but also raised serious doubts

about the Congress Party’s stewardship.531 Taking office as Prime Minister in 1967,

Indira Gandhi followed a radical reformist program of nationalising the banking and

insurance sectors, and helping farmers with US-aided food grain, subsidised fertilisers,

technology, and seeds.532 Known as the ‘Green Revolution’, these reforms, however,

solved the food crisis only for a brief period, and ended up enhancing the conditions

for the richer farmers while reducing them for everyone else.533 India was then hit by

an economic crisis: the price of crude oil rose sharply across the globe and soon the

529 Chandra, p. 2. Narayan was the leader of the coalition-led opposition party, and founded the Janata

Party in January 1977 after the emergency was lifted. His party, in alliance with other anti-Congress

parties, defeated Gandhi’s Congress Party in a historic election win in March 1977. This was the first

time that the Congress was defeated in elections in the post-independence aftermath. 530 See Chandra’s work which is fundamentally about Narayan and Gandhi, and which includes some

of the speeches and writings from their interviews, diaries, and broadcasts. For individual cases, see,

Jayprakash Narayan, Prison Diary: 1975 (Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1977); and Indira Gandhi, Selected

Speeches and Writings of Indira Gandhi, Vol. III, September 1972-March 1977 (New Delhi: Ministry

of Information and Broadcasting, 1984). 531 Marcus Franda, Radical Politics; Atul Kohli, The State and Poverty in India: The Politics of Reform

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 61-79. 532 See Francine Frankel, India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1971). 533 Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and

Politics (London: Zed Books, 1991), pp. 171-94.

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U.S. had terminated aid.534 This critical conjuncture was aggravated by the political

crisis within the Congress Party. After the death of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964, the

Congress Party appeared increasingly fragile. With incompetent and corrupt chief

ministers and the growing popularity of regional, language-, and identity-based

politics, the Congress lost many of its traditional strongholds.535 After her election to

power in 1966, Indira Gandhi attempted to take control of the situation by

concentrating power in the hands of a small and trusted cabinet. While her tactics

initially worked well thanks to her populist slogans like garibi hatao (out with

poverty) and especially during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, the

agricultural-economic crisis, the resultant socio-political discontent in the country, and

the rise of a formidable opposition party under the leadership of JP, made her political

future uneasy and uncertain.536 Two events particularly rubbed salt into this

atmosphere of turmoil. On 12 June, 1975, the Allahabad High Court, in a lawsuit filed

by socialist reformer Raj Narain, found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice

(of bribery and of using government machinery to her advantage) in her 1971 election

in Rae Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, and dismissed her from her duties as Prime Minister.

On the same day, Gandhi’s government lost the elections in Gujarat against a Janata

Morcha coalition. Gandhi appealed to the Supreme Court, which overruled the High

Court decision, but declared on 25 June that she could not carry out her duties as Prime

Minister.537 On the following day, after having consulted a few trusted allies, Gandhi,

in the name of safeguarding democracy, declared the state of emergency by taking

recourse to Article 352 of the Indian Constitution, which proclaims ‘internal

emergency’ in times of severe social and political crisis.

The authoritarian aspect of the emergency was manifest in the immediate

media censorship. Gandhi stated in interviews that a section of the press was anti-

government and that there could be no meaningful use of Article 352 if the press was

allowed to be free.538 Soon after, habeas corpus was suspended, and the Censor Act

534 Chandra, pp. 16-18. 535 See Hewitt, pp. 64-90; see also Robert Desmond King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 536 See Crispin Bates, Subalterns and Raj: South Asia since 1600 (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 230-

34; see also Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and

Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 66-77. 537 See Chandra, pp. 60-69. 538 See Gandhi cited in Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (New York: Fredrick

Ungar Publishing Co., 1982), p. 152.

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was imposed under the MISA and the Defence of India Rules (1971). Soli Sorabjee,

who published an influential pamphlet on press censorship after the emergency, noted

that this was the first time that press censorship had been applied in post-independence

India, compelling news editors to submit news content as well as advertisements to

the Censor Board before publication.539 Most press agencies acquiesced to the

measures, being paralysed by the fast development of events and the extent of Indira

Gandhi’s power. Those that did not, for instance The Indian Express and The

Statesmen, faced tremendous pressure from the state, including electricity cuts, fake

tax cases, refusal of accreditation from the government, arrest and torture of many of

their senior journalists (the case of Kuldip Nayar of The Indian Express is well

known), and so on. Foreign correspondents were also denied entry into India. Through

active control on media and small independent publishing houses, Gandhi sought to

smother all forms of dissent.540 The only acceptable mode of news presentation was

lavishing praise on government policies and the emergency measures.541 Soon after

the censorship was imposed, Gandhi sought to normalise the emergency by restoring

the democractic institutions and bodies such as the Parliament, the cabinet, various

non-governmental organisations, while also weakening the powers of the judiciary

and the legislature by pushing for constitutional amendments. These amendments

made a handful of people, including the President, the Prime Minister and a few

cabinet misters, supreme leaders of the country.542 This was followed by a period of

suspensions and replacements of government officials, through which Gandhi brought

many areas, constitutionally under the Home Ministry’s jurisdiction, within her

control and established herself as the supreme force in Indian politics and affairs,

giving birth to a period of suspicion, nepotism, and conflicted interests among the

bureaucrats. These aspects would come to be powerfully represented in Nayantara

Sahgal’s novel Rich Like Us.

539 Soli Sorabjee, The Emergency, Censorship and the Press in India (London: Writers and Scholars

Educational Trust, 1977), p. 11. 540 Several magazines and journals were discontinued, including the prestigious Seminar. See Sorabjee

for a list, pp. 21-22. 541 Ibid, pp. 16-21. 542 The 38th Amendment was about the non-judiciable satisfaction of the President upon ordinances,

while the 39th Amendment was to make the Prime Minister a body beyond judiciary charges and

scrutiny (as Gandhi’s revenge against the judiciary rulings on her). An atmosphere of crisis ensued as

there were arbitrary transfers of ministers and bureaucrats. Vernon Hewitt tells us that I. K. Gujaral,

who was the then information and broadcasting minister, was transferred because of his obvious

unhappiness ‘with the way the press was censored’. Hewitt, p. 141.

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After these initial turbulences were over, Gandhi expressed the desire to extend

the emergency for a longer period in order to save the economy. Since India was

suffering from the global economic crisis and from a long period of agricultural

underproduction and inflation, Gandhi declared in July 1975 a ‘twenty-point

programme’, which included various reform policies on the recovery of the debt of

landless labourers, the extension of bank credit, the abolition of bonded labour, the

provision of shelter to the homeless, etc.543 Though the economy showed signs of

initial recovery, such success, as Vernon Hewitt tells us, had less to do with the

emergency measures than with good monetary and fiscal policies and a good

monsoon. In fact, these measures even allowed corporate managers to shed labour

power in the name of structural adjustments, ‘encourag[ing] foreign industrial

corporations to enter the Indian economy and dismantle governmental regulations

within the state sector’.544 Corruption in governance and the authoritarianism reached

unprecedented heights as Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi rose to power to ‘modernise’

the nation. His name was already associated with the Maruti car scam.545 In order to

bolster the urban economy and space to court multinational capital, Sanjay started two

campaigns in mid-1976: urban beautification, and family planning. In August 1976,

the Delhi Municipal Corporation, with orders from Sanjay and assistance from local

police and gangsters, bulldozed a slum around the Turkman Gate area under a plan for

the ‘beautification of the city’. In the tussle, six people died officially (with unofficial

543 Chandra, pp. 175-76. 544 Hewitt, pp. 129-30; these policies were less to deal with stricter implementation than promotion and

advertisement of the country’s economic progress. For instance, V. P. Dutt, a political scientist who

later became a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha – the upper house of the parliament – has

published an article in Asian Survey, one of the most critical of journals of India’s emergency measures,

commenting that ‘India before the proclamation of emergency was a rapid build-up of the environment

of insurrection, large-scale violence and disorder, and civil conflict’ (p. 1125). It was only through a

disciplinarian and authoritarian government that democracy and positive economic progress could be

ensured: ‘Industrial and agricultural production proceeded apace. Price stability was ensured and the

dogs of inflation were put under leash…bonded labour was freed, agricultural wages were fixed and

enhanced […] scarcities disappeared and commodities of common use became available in fair supply’

(pp. 1137-38). Dutt, ‘The Emergency in India: Background and Rationale’, Asian Survey, 16.12 (1976),

1124-38. Such a rosy picture continued almost hand-in-hand with the discourse of colonialism in the

understanding of India as a country full of illiterate, backward-minded, and unruly population. P. N.

Dhar, the personal secretary to Gandhi during the emergency who was later ‘replaced’, writes that for

a nation such as India ‘deeply rooted in community and faith, liberal democracy is an anomaly’ (p.

229). The only possible way one could encounter this anomaly or the crisis that is routinely

manufactured with the rise of people like Jayprakash Narayan was a constitutional reform, a

disciplining of the chaos, a presidential form of democracy (p. 334). These claims quite clearly indicate

the support that Gandhi’s emergency policies and measures garnered from the ruling classes. See Dhar,

Indira Gandhi, the “Emergency” and Indian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 545 Hewitt, p. 138.

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figures ranging between 40 and 150), and many were injured. This incident was

famously portrayed in Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, as a magical

battle between Saleem Sinai and his arch-enemy Shiva (standing for Sanjay), the right-

hand of the Widow (Indira Gandhi). There was a huge protest in Delhi and in other

parts of the nation against this act (adumbrating a return of resistance) which forced

the plan to be halted temporarily, as both the Prime and Housing Ministers avoided

the issue suggestively. Around the same period, a family planning programme was in

order. Hewitt writes about an ordinance by March 1976 that pays fiscal incentives to

people, especially government employees, who are willing to undergo vasectomy.

Though it started as a slow campaign in the metropolis, by July and August 1976 the

campaign turned into a pressure programme where certain professions bearing on state

patronage (teachers and clerks from various sections of civil service) were forced to

follow a target fulfilment scheme. ‘This led’, Hewitt adds‚ ‘in the circumstances of

unbridled executive power and an inadequate command structure, to the overzealous

implementation of already coercive policies’.546 He notes that by August, roughly

around the same time as the slum demolition programme, unmarried males were

sterilised, as were old men, because of the frenzy of target fulfilment. The programme,

David Selbourne writes, was worse in the villages, as people were brought by force to

medical centres which had no proper equipment for vasectomy and no provision for

post-vasectomy care.547 These scenes are captured poignantly in Rohinton Mistry’s

novel, A Fine Balance, as teenager Iswar and his uncle Om are carelessly sterilised,

tortured and reduced to lives as disabled beggars.

Thus, the constitutional emergency was the result of a sustained crisis in

agriculture and food production, and subsequently in commodity price hikes and in

governance. It was meant to bring the nation into stability; instead, it resulted in a

regime of political authoritarianism, corruption, and unchecked state violence. Not

only was the media gagged and controlled, any possibility of opposition was crushed

through rampant imprisonment and torture of common people. As Hewitt tells us, the

state governments were asked by the central government to show restraint in their use

of emergency powers. Between June 1975 and April 1977, around 40,000 people had

546 Ibid, p. 140. 547 David Selbourne, An Eye to India: The Unmasking of A Tyranny (Middlesex: Penguin, 1977).

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been arrested, of which around 34,000 were prosecuted.548 In this atmosphere of

coercion and state terror and in the absence of an oppositional local media, political

criticism came mainly from international presses and journals. Noted scholars such as

W. Morris-Jones, Andre Gunder Frank, and David Taylor contributed to our

understanding of the political and economic factors responsible for the emergency and

of the way institutional structures of democracy were being corroded by the Congress

Party’s capitalist-dictatorial tendencies.549 Ranajit Guha, as we noted in Chapter One,

fiercely criticised the emergency measures, asserting that true democracy never

actually existed in India.550 For obvious reasons, such writing of dissent did not find

much space in the discursive representation of the emergency, and the only

oppositional dissident narratives were underground newsletters and pamphlets.551

When the emergency was lifted and Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party was defeated by

the newly formed Janata Party, the publishing world saw a flurry of critical works:

notably, B. M. Sinha’s Operation Emergency (1977), V. K. Naraismahan’s

Democracy Redeemed (1977), S. S. Chib’s Nineteen Fearful Months (1978), and

others.552 These works were mainly written in three overlapping genres – political

exposé, prison memoirs, and public judgements – and aimed at exposing the

government’s repressive mechanisms and seeking, or even asserting, justice.553 They

548 Hewitt, Mobilisation, p. 142. 549 See, W. H. Morris-Jones, ‘Whose Emergency? India’s or Indira’s?’, World Today, 31.11 (1975),

451-61; David Taylor, ‘India in the State of Emergency’, World Survey 93/94 (1976), 1-16; Andre

Gunder Frank, ‘Emergence of Permanent Emergency in India’, Economic and Political Weekly,

12.11(1977), 463-75. 550 Guha, ‘Indian Democracy’, pp. 39-53, p. 44. In an essay titled ‘Indian Democracy and Bourgeois

Reaction’ published in a Bengali journal just a few months before the emergency, Partha Chatterjee and

Arup Mallik, borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, speak of two phases of Caesarism in Indian politics –

a first phase constituting a weak Indian bourgeoisie, suffering from the crisis of authority and taking

resort to activist cadres for populist politics, and the second phase of founding an ‘alliance of monopoly

capital, large landowners, the petty bourgeois, and the foreign capital’. For such a historical formation,

they conclude, Indian politics not only forces consent from the population and installs corruption in

governance, but also encourages, in its evident links with fascism, a direct authoritarian government.

They called for urgent solidarity movements and resistance by the working class and the peasantry to

stop an imminent authoritarianism. Chatterjee later translated the essay and published in A Possible

India, pp. 35-57, (pp. 51-56). 551 Underground newsletters and pamphlets were the only oppositional dissident narratives. For a study,

see Sajal Basu, Underground Literature during the Emergency (Calcutta: Minerva, 1978); C. G. K.,

Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy: The Right to Rebel (New Delhi: Vision Books, 1977). 552 See for example, B. M. Sinha, Operation Emergency (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1977); Promilla

Kalhan, Black Wednesday: Power, Politics, Emergency and Election (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1977);

V. K. Naraismahan, Democracy Redeemed (Delhi: S. Chand and Company, 1977); Michael Henderson,

Experiments with Untruth: India under Emergency (Delhi: Macmillan, 1977); S. S. Chib, Nineteen

Fateful Months (Delhi: Light and Life, 1978). 553 Sinha’s Operation Emergency had on its cover ‘on 25 June 1975, Indian democracy was put to

death’. On the back cover was printed dramatically in heavy ink point after point: ‘political leaders and

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mostly followed the same pattern: beginning from the period immediately before the

emergency, and describing the event not as a crystallisation of the long politico-

economic crisis but mainly as a method through which Indira Gandhi could crush the

dissenting voices within democracy and carry forward her personal propaganda. The

narration would often involve examples of dissent during the emergency554 and

conclude with the restoration of liberty from the dark days of dictatorship by the

Gandhian figure of JP. The main purpose of these narratives, apart from depicting the

emergency conditions, was to rouse public sympathy for the agenda of punishing the

culprits (high and low) responsible for the event.555 Soon, however, a shortage of

rainfall accompanied by an inefficient coalition government led to underproduction,

and subsequently a steep hike in prices.556 These crisis moments paved way for a re-

election two years later with Indira Gandhi’s return to power, who then swiftly

dismantled the inquiry commissions set up during the Janata government and covered

up all data.

For anthropologist Emma Tarlo, who wrote one of the first critical monographs

on this period, these political narratives and genres together composed the

‘oppositional narrative’ of the emergency, against the official one propagated through

the government-controlled popular media and official documentations.557 But Tarlo

also notes that because of the heavily tendentious nature of these oppositional

narratives – such as their highly sensational tone and their prejudices, assumptions,

and strategic focus on the transgressions of the Gandhian regime – they said very little

about the actual mechanisms behind the coercive measures, i.e. the nexus between the

repressive measures and the politics of coercion, the various layers of resistance

workers, intellectuals and journalists nabbed in midnight swoop, and jailed/press gagged, and

emasculated…’ etc. 554 There were independent publications of collections of dissenting articles and newspaper reports from

local, underground, and foreign presses, such as The Smugglers of Truth, or the poetry collection, Voices

of Emergency (which suggest the active through muted culture of dissent during the emergency;

although some of the pieces of course were fabricated retrospectively to point at the existence of such

a culture). Many of these political narratives referred to these pieces. Chib’s Nineteenth Faithful Months

was dedicated to the emergency dissenters. See Tarlo, pp. 32-33. 555 It is to this aim that the Shah Commission was set up to carry out official inquiry regarding the abuse

of power during the period. 556 John Dayal and Ajoy Bose, who wrote a book against the emergency measures of Gandhi, felt that

not only was the Janata government not quick enough to use the public sentiment against the culprit

Congress party members, the immense economic crisis in the following months betrayed a feeling that

Gandhi’s emergency probably had a logic. That Gandhi came back only two years after the

revolutionary political triumph hints at the relevance of the claim. See John Dayal and Ajoy Bose, The

Shah Commission Begins (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978), p. 6. 557 Tarlo, pp. 31-44.

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discourses, the suffering of the urban poor or the villagers – in short, what ‘actually

happened’ during the emergency.558 As Phatik Ghosh has noted for the popular

Naxalite literary works, these political narratives, though not always intentional,

distorted the picture and disabled the premise for a sustained critical inquiry. Bipan

Chandra, whose monograph on the emergency was published in the same year as

Tarlo’s, also finds a similar problem of shortage of materials and critical reviews. He

writes that resources on the emergency were astonishingly ‘lacking’ for any sort of

objective inquiry, save a few government documents, newspaper articles, and

speeches and interviews by heads of state. To tackle such a situation, he speaks of

using the ‘historian’s craft’ in understanding what could have happened from what did

not happen.559 Unlike Chandra who proceeds to write an official (or oppositional)

history of the period from his discoveries and assumptions, Tarlo attempts to develop

an anthropological understanding of what remained beneath the said and dominant

narratives – the moments of resistance and dissent against the official documents and

procedures of truth production. She builds her counter-narrative by reading through

the local bureaucratic documents, or the ‘paper truths’, of the slum clearance, and by

conducting interviews with the slum-demolition survivors.560 From her excellent

discoveries, she was amazed to find that there was hardly any significant politicised

resistance from the ‘subalterns’. What emerges from the interviews is ‘some sort of

collective critique of the Emergency’, which compels her to think whether the official

and counter-official representations are essentially ‘entangled narratives’.561 For

Tarlo, such a situation arises from a ‘lack of self-reflexivity’, from the slum dwellers’

unquestionable faith in Gandhi as a rich but noble figure, to the appropriation of the

Gandhian rhetoric that the ‘bureaucratic officials’ were the ones to blame.562 These

findings are crucial for an engagement with resistance discourses and practices during

the emergency, but it is important to note that anthropology, like history, is not beyond

ideological assumptions and limitations of the discipline. What Tarlo understands as

lacking in the oppositional narratives can also be applied to her own works; what she

chooses to read as resistance can also be an ideological formation, especially in the

558 Ibid, p. 47. 559 Chandra, pp. 6-7; however, because of his clearly sympathetic reading of Gandhi, such a craft did

not allow him to question the truth in the documents, or the politics of truth production as such. 560 Tarlo, pp. 29-34. 561 She finds this counter-narrative largely ‘coherent’, celebrating Gandhi’s character and vision. Tarlo,

p. 18, p. 225. 562 Ibid, pp. 220-21.

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sense that the very language she uses for understanding the politics – the language of

subalterneity – is itself problematic, since, unlike ‘peasants’ or the ‘working class’,

the ‘political consciousness’ of the subalterns cannot be defined in the inherited terms

of class analysis.563 What these arguments suggest is that the role of ideology,

coercion, and consent in the production of truth and political meaning-making cannot

be overlooked if one attempts to understand and recover the narratives of resistance

during the emergency.564

This is where I think the reading of the novels becomes particularly

important.565 Unlike ‘oppositional narratives’, novels do not only present a blinkered

and generic politico-historical analysis. They engage with the historical issues and also

project the problem of ideology and truth production in their treatment of form and

mode. Indeed, Tarlo’s work refers a number of times to some of the novels I will

discuss here. But Tarlo, Chandra, and others hesitate to depend on fiction writing

because of the latter’s mixing of imagination with history. As I have just argued, the

disciplines of history and anthropology, and for that matter all disciplines including

563 There is a lot of discussion on this in the postcolonial context – from the Subaltern Studies

Collective’s use of the term subaltern in a historiographical sense, to Spivak’s use in a discursive sense,

to the materialist class, caste, and gender based analysis of the term. The revival of the term in current

historical-sociological works by Uday Chandra, Srila Roy, Alfa Nielsen, and others challenges the

term’s older use in recovering the language and politics of subaltern resistance. Tarlo’s use remains

predominantly in the discursive sense more than a rooted class or caste based understanding. For a

discussion, see, Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 1988), pp. 271-316; ‘Rethinking Resistance: Subaltern Politics and the State in Contemporary

India’, ed. by Uday Chandra and Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45.4 (2015),

563-676; and New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony in Resistance in Contemporary

India, ed. by Srila Roy and Alf Gunveld Nilsen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015). 564 For a note on the politics of coercion and complicity during the emergency period in the rural areas

and amongst the urban middle classes, see Lee Schlesinger’s study of a Maharashtra village, ‘The

Emergency in a Village’, Asian Survey, 17.7 (1977), 627-47; and Bipan Chandra, pp. 173-82. 565 It is necessary to remember here that the emergency literature is very wide, rich, and complex. There

has been work in almost every conceivable genre of literature and culture: diaries (Jayprakash Narayan,

The Essential JP: Philosophy and Prison Diaries of Jayprakash Narayan, ed. by Satish Kumar [New

Delhi: Prism, 1978]), letters (Varavara Rao, Captive Imagination: Letters from Prison [New Delhi:

Penguin, 2010]), memoirs (P. N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, 2000), journalistic accounts (Kuldip Nayar,

Emergency Retold [Delhi: Konark, 2013]), anecdotes (Jagmohan, Island of Truth [Delhi: Vikas, 1978]),

cartoons (Abu Abraham, The Games of Emergency: A Collection of Cartoons and Articles [Delhi:

Vikas, 1977]), short stories (O. V. Vijayan, After the Hanging and Other Stories [New Delhi: Penguin,

1989]), poetry and songs (Voices of Emergency: An All India Anthology of Protest Poetry of 1975-1977

Emergency, ed. by John Oliver Perry [New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1983]), paintings (Vivan

Sundaram, Famous Mrs G [1977]), films (Kissa Kursi Ka, dir. by Amrit Nahata [Vagawat Deshpande

et al,, 1977]), underground newsletter/literature (Sajal Basu, Underground Literature), street theatre

(Yakshagana; Kursi, Kursi, Kursi, Machine, and others by Sardar Hashmi’s Jana Natya Mancha), and

so forth. I am choosing novels for the genre’s historical links with realism.

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literary studies, have their share of ideological biases, assumptions, and limitations.

What literature particularly does well, precisely because of its self-reflexive nature

and its unpretentious attempt at not imparting some objective (universal) truths, is to

show how these ideologies are formed, practised, and implemented, and to reveal what

claims these ideologies are meant to fulfil. Its form in this context becomes both a

medium of social investigation and a discursive instruction in which truths, extracted

from social investigations, are produced under particular circumstances, and are

measured, acted out, and implemented in a particular way. This is also what Ayelet

Ben-Yashai and Eitan Ban-Yosef argue in a recent study of Indian emergency fictions.

For them, the field of literature is a ‘discursive battle’: ‘the stakes of this discursive

battle are not only in the ways in which the Emergency will be remembered but, even

more so, in understanding how the Emergency was understood – or what the

Emergency actually was – as it was taking place’.566 I am interested in this processual,

discursive aspect of fictional writing of the emergency. Literature does not only depict

what happened, but also how it happened and how it was remembered over a period

of time. This processual character of truth-making can give us an understanding of

how the emergency was received – why Gandhi’s character is physically absent in the

novels, why some of the novels present the period in magical/grotesque language, why

the emergency’s effect is shown through the disabling of body and profession, what

roles class, caste, community, and gender play in the emergency narratives, and

finally, how the emergency is critiqued through these receptions and representations.

I will argue here that these novels take the realist form to capture the acts of

human struggle against an elaborate and repressive machinery of governance. But,

because this machinery is so elaborate and vague, and their consequences so widely

566 Ayelet Ben-Yashai and Eitan Ban-Yosef, ‘Emergency Fictions’, in The History of Indian Novel in

English, ed. by Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 162-76 (p. 163;

emphasis in the original). I should add here that despite the richness of the literary and artistic works,

critical studies on them are deplorably lacking. In fact, other than this essay and a critical survey of the

emergency-based novels by O. P. Mathur, Indira Gandhi and the Emergency as Viewed in the Indian

Novel (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2004), there are hardly any notable works that engage with the critical

questions of form, language, imagery, literary-theoretical investigations, and such. One of the reasons

for this lack of engagement, or the lack of availability of material for that matter, is the Congress

government’s forcible suppression of the period from public memory. As Chandra noted, there is hardly

a good body of literature available for a historical inquiry. Indira Gandhi, after coming back to power

in 1980, reportedly burnt all the documents related with the emergency. The dominant reign of the

Congress Party in the post-emergency Indian politics (winning six election terms out of eight till today)

made sure that not much sustained and critical work of any kind – historical, sociological, or literary-

aesthetic – could be carried out in this field.

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damaging for any clear reproduction of truth, they use a number of modes – magical,

grotesque, critical realist, etc. – to comprehend how to export social reality to readers

and how to employ a resistance-based reading meaningfully. Through the use of these

specific modes, the novels make a case for why the constitutional emergency as a

catastrophic conjuncture was different from the famine and the political uprising. At

the same time, because these events are all part of the same axis of modernity and part

of the crisis in agriculture and economy, there are important convergences and

similarities between the ways each mode of writing is practiced. The modes of magic

and grotesque share many convergences with the modes of the quest and urban fantasy

in Naxalism, but there are also crucial distinctions, especially in the absence of a

forceful and ruthless narratorial commentary in the former. On the other hand, the

critical nature of Mahasweta Devi’s writing has powerful resonance in Sahgal’s, but

they also use different realist frameworks. Although Sahgal and Mistry draw from the

classic use of realism, there are a number of differences between their respective use

of satirical and ironic modes. Furthermore, between Sahgal and Mistry, as between

Sahgal and Devi, the narrative form is predominantly class- and caste-based. Although

both Devi and Mistry focus on the marginal communities and castes, there are as many

fundamental differences between their ideologies as there are between their

exploitation of literary form. Keeping in mind these important differences and

convergences, I wish to now turn to the literary works of the emergency to understand

how the specific conjuncture of the event gave birth to specific modulations within a

critical use of realism. The first section of this chapter discusses the novels of Salman

Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), O. V. Vijayan (The Saga of Dharmapuri) and Arun

Joshi (The City and the River). These novels do not speak analytically about the

emergency, but rather depict the conditions of living under emergency in a symbolic-

allegorical framework. These conditions are framed primarily through the exploitation

of the body, and in the effect of a realist struggle between a grand historical force and

its infliction of pain on lower-class, helpless, vulnerable characters. I say ‘effect’

because realism’s premise is destabilised through the emphasis on the irreal modes of

the magical, the grotesque and the mythical. At the same time, unlike Devi and

Bhattacharya, who, as I have argued above, made sustained critical readings of history,

economy, and politics through the modes of the quest and urban fantasy to uncover

the dominant social and cultural values, these irreal modes do not make any sustained

analysis of the historical conditions, nor are their critiques as forceful, energetic, and

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politically enabling (save Vijayan’s) as the others. To analyse the representation of the

emergency, I bring these modes together and call the framework extra-realism or a

realism from without, where the effect of realism is produced through the use and the

undermining of its conventions, or what Christopher Warnes in his study of magical

realism calls the form’s attempt to ‘write back to the paradigm of realism’.567 A more

thorough reading of India’s postcolonial emergency realism will then follow in the

second section, where I discuss Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us and Rohinton

Mistry’s A Fine Balance for an argument on class- and caste-inflected critical

realism.568

Magic, Grotesquery, and Myth, or Realism from Without

Magical realism, as the term denotes, produces a rendering of reality where magical

and realistic elements co-exist. This is not done to consciously subvert reality, as is

the case of surrealism, but to capture an old society’s vision of reality which is often

composite in character because of the society’s multiple histories of cultural subjection

and contact. Fredric Jameson tells us that magical realism as a formal mode is born in

a society that ‘betrays the overlap or the coexistence of pre-capitalist with nascent

capitalist or technological features’, and thus ‘disjunction is structurally present’ in

it.569 Writers use magic as a ‘fictional device of the supernatural, taken from any

source that the writer chooses, syncretized with a developed realistic, historical

perspective’.570 The form received worldwide fame through the works of Latin

American writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel

567 Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism, p. 19. 568 It is necessary to remember here that class, caste, and body are not categorically separate registers.

It is the lower classes that suffer the government’s emergency injunctions as the ruling classes enjoy

the benefits. The novels represent both the conditions of suffering and of benefit through the

representation of the interconnectedness of class, caste, and body. 569 Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry 12.2 (1986), 301-25 (p. 311). 570 Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Novel: Seeing with a Third Eye (London:

Routledge, 1998), p. 16.

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Allende,571 and later through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981),572 which

is widely regarded as one of the canonical texts in postcolonial literature.573 This form

of writing, as Brenda Cooper notes, became popular in Latin America mainly as a

medium of critique both of the Eurocentric empiricist discourses of reality and of the

contemporary totalitarian-capitalist regimes.574 Similarly, the use of magical realism

was contextual for Rushdie, who was writing back both to Gandhi’s totalitarian

governance and to the Eurocentric enlightenment-oriented understanding of history

and reality.575 He stated in an interview that ‘The book was conceived and begun

during the Emergency, and I was very angry about that. The stain of it is on the book.

The Emergency and the Bangladesh war were the two most terrible events since

Independence, and they had to be treated as the outrageous crimes that they were’.576

In this autobiographical telling of Saleem Sinai’s three-generation family history from

1915 till 1978, which Sinai considers as ‘handcuffed to [Indian] history’,577 the

emergency appears in the final section of the novel after Saleem is rescued from the

Bangladesh Liberation War and brought back to India. The shift in tone and imagery

571 Alejo Carpentier first notably used the form in his novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949). In the

novel’s prologue he wrote about his experience of the ‘marvelous real’ in Haiti, which he described as

‘an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an

unaccustomed insight that is singularly favoured by the unexpected richness of reality’. See ‘On the

Marvelous Real in America’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. by Louis Parkinson

Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 75-88 (p. 87). It is in the

works of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, and others in late 1960s and 70s

Latin America that the form achieved wide success. These writers used the form to situate the

unexplained co-existence of logic and reasoning and superstition and myth that characterised the

‘authentic’ constitution of Latin American societies. García Márquez, for example, describes ‘a world

of omens, premonitions, cures and superstitions that is authentically ours, truly Latin American’. See

Cooper, p. 16. This understanding both opened the form’s use to a wider postcolonial writing and

readership and made it into a readymade case for commercial success in the West. For a critical reading

of the form in the postcolonial context, see Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism. 572 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 2006). 573 It is unnecessary to rehearse the enormous critical literature available on the work. Interested readers

may consult, Ursula Kluwick, Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (London:

Routledge, 2013); and for an overview and reception of the novel: Neil Ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation,

Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004);

and Norbert Schurer, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum,

2004). 574 Cooper not only tells us about the critical element embedded in the form, but also how the form was

used to serve academic postcolonial discourses. As magical realism was understood to represent

disjunctive, composite, hybrid qualities of reality and realism, it soon became interchangeable with

postcolonialism and diaspora studies which championed, courtesy of Homi Bhabha and others, features

of hybridity, liminality, marginality, and ambivalence in the postcolonial subject. See Cooper, Magical,

pp. 15-36. 575 For a reading of the history and the context of Rushdie’s use of magic realism, see Ursula Kluwick,

Exploring Magic Realism. 576 Rushdie, ‘Salman Rushdie: John Haffenden’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. by Michael

Reder (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), p. 38. 577 Rushdie, p. 3.

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from the apparent sympathy and critical solidarity for Nehruvian democracy to that of

anger, cynicism, and the permanence of a dark and bleak atmosphere characterising

the emergency period has caused many critics to consider the novel a nationalist

allegory of postcolonial Indian history, ‘a Nehruvian epic.’578 The anti-emergency

rhetoric579 is deployed here mainly through the discourses of the body. Indira Gandhi

is presented in the novel as an evil, monstrous character whose bodily features

correspond to her brand of violent and deceptive politics. She is called the Widow and

is out to take revenge on Saleem because of Nehru’s special liking for him as the most

powerful of the Midnight’s Children. She never appears in the novel, but controls the

events and inflicts excruciating pain on the children, leading finally to the ending or

‘ectomising’ of their magical powers, which might be said to represent the submission

of Nehruvian democracy to postcolonial dictatorial rule. Rushdie uses the devices of

magic (in a heavy symbolic garb) and synecdoche to represent the unreal nature of the

times.

Unlike Nehru, whose bodily features are not given much consideration in the

novel, Indira Gandhi seems to be a character whose physiognomy dictates her

temperament and politics. There is a repeated reference to the centre-parting of her

hair. Consider Saleem the narrator’s words here: ‘Her hair parted in the centre, was

snow-white on one side and blackasnight on the other, so that depending on which

profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine’.580 This statement has

symbolic bearing on Gandhi’s political inheritance and her style of governance.

Centre-parting hair reminds Saleem of the hairstyle of William Methwold, whose

property in Bombay Saleem’s father and a few other families bought and settled into

after the departure of the British from India.581 Since this departure was marked by a

bloody history of the Partition of India, Methwold’s hair epitomises a British politics

of treachery and violence which, through this settlement, India seems to have

578 Amit Chaudhuri, Clearing a Space: Reflection on India, Literature and Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang,

2008), p. 117. Also, for a reading of Rushdie’s romanticised understanding of nation, the Congress

Party, and its principle of unity in diversity, see Josna Rege, ‘Victims into Protagonist? Midnight’s

Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties’, Studies in the Novel, 29.3 (1997),

342-75. 579 Neelam Srivastava writes that the novel’s ‘entire take on the history of the Indian nation is shaped

by the fact of its being an anti-emergency narrative’. Srivastava, Secularism and the Postcolonial Indian

Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 10. 580 Rushdie, Children, p. 558. 581 Ibid, pp. 121-41.

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allegorically taken up and carried forward. Indira Gandhi’s rise to power within the

Congress Party through factionalism and deception seems to be the direct result of

these incidents here. She broke away from the old Congress Party, founded a new one

based on her populist politics and reform ideology, and created further factions as she

could not trust her senior cabinet ministers, weakening the Party system completely in

the process.582 The colour of her hair, half white and half black, seems to suggest

elements of corruption and factionalism in her government. Picture Singh, a leader of

the magician’s ghetto (slum) in Delhi, tells Saleem that ‘the country’s corrupt, “black”

economy had grown as large as the official, “white” variety’.583 Whenever Gandhi’s

government is mentioned in the novel, corruption is used synonymously (for instance,

in a reference to L. N. Mishra’s death).584 As the novel approaches the emergency

period, the styling of her hair, centre-parted and black and white, receives special

meaning. The white part is thin but more noticeable against a thick black majority. If

Gandhi’s rise to power is marked by factionalism and corruption, the duality of her

hair suggests the dual meaning of the emergency – the white part stands for official

propaganda during the emergency, the narrative of discipline, order and collective

benefit; and the black part indicates the unofficial, damaging, and torturing reality of

the times. As Saleem tells us: ‘the Emergency, too, had a white part – public, visible,

documented, a matter for historians – and a black part which, being secret macabre

untold must be a matter for us’.585 This is an insightful reading by Rushdie, who

anticipates Tarlo’s claims of two narratives of the emergency, the official one and the

subaltern one. What Rushdie particularly does is to employ the figurative device of

synecdoche where the part stands for the whole. Through constant references to the

meaning of Gandhi’s hair to symbolise her deceptive and evil politics, Rushdie creates

the effect of a gigantic nature of evil that is Gandhi. Similar to this novel, in none of

the major novels of the period, by Sahgal or by Mistry, does Gandhi appear as a human

being (Sahgal refers to one ‘Madam’ manipulating the conditions from behind the

582 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, 21.38-39

(1986), 1697-1708. Nothing appears more appropriate as a suggestion for this national-political

takeover through authority, deception, and violence, than the slogan raised by her cabinet President

Devkant Barooha, ‘Indira is India, India is Indira’. See Pranay Gupte, Mother India: A Political

Biography of Indira Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 428. 583 Rushdie, Children, p. 558. 584 Ibid, pp. 578-79. As we noted in Vernon Hewitt’s comments, corruption and incompetent

bureaucracy prevented Congress from implementing the populist left-leaning reform policies after the

1971 election and from carrying out the twenty-point programme. 585 Rushdie, Children, p. 588.

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scenes, while Mistry captures a rally where Gandhi is so far away from Ishwar and

Om that all they register are an imposing voice blaring resolutely from the mics and a

gigantic figure looking over from one of the huge banners, which ironically falls down

during the rally). Through this device, Rushdie succeeds in showing that Gandhi was

such a larger-than-life force during the emergency, that her all-consuming presence

makes it impossible to represent it in fiction, because any ‘human’ representation of

her would not be able to capture the enormity of her crimes.

The larger-than-life character of Gandhi is further suggested through her

magical control of the climactic conditions during the emergency. Saleem tells us that

the emergency was a time of dark weather and damaged bodily organs. Like the

declaration of independence, the emergency is declared on a midnight. The irony is

captured through the depiction of the reverse scenario: there is ‘suspension-of-civil-

rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrests-

of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born’.586 This

evil birth of the emergency corresponds to the days of winter, fog, and violence. The

period is described as one of ‘endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or

rather (because it is important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as stream-rinsed

plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light’.587 Gandhi’s dark magic turns the

world into a cold place incapable of sustaining life. This is suggested in the difficult

birth of Aadam, Saleem’s son, who is born mute and falls prey to tuberculosis. Both

Parvati and the magicians from the ghetto try their best magic spells on Aadam, but to

no avail. Saleem reasons that, since the Widow wants the entire race of the magical

children to die, his son’s incurable disease is related with the ‘macrocosmic disease’

of the emergency, ‘under whose influence the sun has become as pallid and diseased

as our son’.588 The emergency conditions damage speech capacities as well. Saleem

describes the emergency as a time of ‘fears and silence’: his child Aadam does not

speak a word during the emergency months; his mentor, the bubbly snake-charmer

Picture Singh, is found dumb for months; and a general atmosphere of whispers and

hushed speech prevails. Further, Saleem, with his magical power of smell, sniffs

despotism in the air. This takes place mainly after the ‘Constitutional altering’, which

586 Ibid, p. 585. 587 Ibid, p. 590. 588 Ibid, p. 590.

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refers here to the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution when judicial and civil powers

were suspended to consolidate authority in the hands of the Prime Minister and give

her a near-absolute dictatorship.589 Saleem smells ‘the ghosts of ancient empires in the

air […] in the city which was littered with phantoms of Slave Kings and Mughals, of

Aurangzeb the merciless and the last, pink conquerors, I inhaled once again the sharp

aroma of despotism. It smelled like burning oily rags’.590 This turns out to be an

indicator of Indira Gandhi’s historical legacy, which is situated not in the democratic

politics of Nehru, but in the wily and deceptive British colonialism and in the instances

of despotism in Indian Muslim political history. Delhi’s Muslim past of authoritarian

rule seems to echo in her politics of everyday violence, in the ‘burning oily rags’.

Through these dark magic and evil forces, ‘the emergency’, Saleem tells us, ‘damaged

the reality so badly that nobody could put it together again’.591 These opinions are

given by Saleem and his slum friends through whom Rushdie seems not only to state

that what is considered reality (in this case the goodness in the emergency measures)

is often manufactured by the propaganda of lies, but also that fiction can use its

properties meaningfully to retrieve the unsaid counter-narratives against the dictatorial

regime. I will come back to this point soon.

These coercive instances lead to the final episodes where Saleem stands

opposite his nemesis, Shiva, who was also born with the same magical powers as he

and now works for the Widow. As Saleem loses the fight and the monstrous machines

(bulldozers) destroy his magicians’ ghetto (the slum), he is transported to a jail in

Banaras along with other midnight’s children, to be tortured, stripped of his powers

and normalised. Saleem calls this act of cutting out the organ of magical powers

sperectomy or the draining of all hope and optimism,592 harking back to the Gandhian

government’s vasectomy programme. Clare Barker reads these elements in this

metaphorical novel about disabled children in terms of the postcolonial politics of

order and homogeneity, where ‘aberrations and monstrosities’ are no longer

accommodated.593 She writes, ‘the emergency is depicted in the novel as a state of

exception in which Gandhi (or ‘the Widow’ as Saleem characterises her) exercises

589 See Hewitt, p. 135; Chandra, pp. 167-69. 590 Ibid, p. 592. 591 Rushdie, Children, p. 586. 592 Ibid, p. 611. 593 Clare Barker, Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality

(London: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 123-58 (p. 147).

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supreme sovereignty over Indian citizens’ lives and bodies, dictating who will live or

die, and what function their bodies will be permitted to perform’.594 The imprisonment

and torture of the midnight’s children and the subsequent excision of the reproductive

organs, according to her, is an indication of the Foucauldian normalising measures of

a modern state: ‘by magnifying the terrors of normalization through the use of

supernatural “aberrancies” and hyperindividualized disciplinary regimes, he

[Rushdie] refracts the casual forms of corporeal surveillance encountered in everyday

life and holds all degree of biopolitical governmentality up for careful scrutiny’.595

Barker’s observations are astute here, but I also think that these instances are used to

highlight the possibilities of co-operation and struggles of the lower classes against

the authoritative biopolitical power of the state – which, I will argue, further suggests

how complicated the question of democratic politics in a postcolonial society is. After

suffering days of torture by the Widow (or Gandhi’s agents in a widow hostel in

Banaras), Saleem decides to call up his fellow ‘children’ for a final Midnight

Children’s Conference to build up hope and resistance: ‘we, who as children

quarrelled fought divided distrusted broke apart, are suddenly together, united, as

one!’596 But there appears hardly any hope for collective resistance from the tortured

and enervated bodies. He also finds cases of intolerance and impatience existing still

in the children’s community. This not only damages his expectations of the possibility

of organised resistance in democracy but also reminds him of the ghetto, whose

Communist political struggle was compromised so much by the various factional

interests and Left sectarian politics that the resistance against the repressive forces and

machines during the slum clearance appeared flimsy and spineless. These

disillusioning realisations thwart any optimism in Saleem when Gandhi, in the style

of a whimsical autocrat, calls for fresh elections and is defeated by a coalition-led

people’s government composed of the extreme right and left parties. Saleem then says,

‘I have managed to cure myself of the optimism virus at last – maybe others, with the

disease still in their blood, felt otherwise. At any rate, I’ve had – I had had, on that

March day – enough, more than enough of politics’.597 Saleem dies at the end of the

594 Ibid, p. 147. 595 Ibid, p. 153. 596 Rushdie, Children, p. 610. 597 Ibid, p. 616.

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novel and his body explodes and disintegrates into as many parts as there are people

in India.

This explosion calls to mind the explosion of Harbart’s body in Harbart (not

least because Harbart was also impaired in his speech abilities and considered a freak).

But whereas we read a case of outrage and angst in Harbart or an instance of critical

conjuncture of capitalist modernity in Bhattacharya’s use of the urban fantastic mode,

in Rushdie and in Saleem we find a deafening pessimism. The problem lies, I think,

as much in the difference in ideological commitment between Bhattacharya and

Rushdie as in their choice of modes between urban fantasy and magic (which of course

is shaped by their ideologies, respectively, of faith and faithlessness in struggle-based

politics). There are two suggestions to be drawn from Rushdie’s ending. First, political

regimes are cyclical in nature. Democracy gives birth to authoritarianism and

authoritarianism brings a coalition-based democracy to the fore, whose very

composite nature pushes for social chaos, requiring a strong and authoritarian rule to

emerge again (especially if we consider Gandhi’s return to power in 1980). Second,

however, the cyclical nature of political governance does not invalidate the praxis of

resistance and of sustained collective and struggle-based politics. What is important

for our understanding here is the immense struggle and hope that underlie the

formation and operation of a coalition-based politics. If Rushdie was pessimistic about

coalition politics due to Gandhi’s return to power, if he was also angry about the

emergency and the dictatorial rule as he has stated in interviews, he could have shown

a critical engagement with the problems and possibilities of coalition-based politics,

the faith and hope that a repressed population has for that politics, rather than to refuse

to acknowledge its existence or dismiss its possibilities. Similarly, if the novel uses

magical aspects to both situate and challenge the order of current reality, there could

have been an ending of another kind of reality, which is not totally dissevered from

the pessimistic realisations of contemporary politics, but which is also an exploration

of the richness and utopian possibilities that reality holds in itself, and in which magic

realism as a form inheres. The pessimistic ending seems to lie in the particular use of

the magic mode itself. Magic is mainly used as a descriptive fictional mode through

which exciting aspects hidden within reality are captured. As Wendy Farris writes, it

mainly ‘reports and witnesses’ through its defocalised narration and through the

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mirroring of reality.598 The most sustained critical engagement through the use of

magic lies not in satirising Gandhi’s ‘dark’ powers or her control of the climactic

conditions, but in suggesting how the removal of magical powers would give birth to

an understanding of reality that is linear, bureaucratic, state-imposed, and non-layered.

But in actual life and politics, this cannot and did not happen. The establishment of

the Janata Party, as the first notable opposition party through the coalition of

oppositional voices, is just one example of the potential that a pluralist democratic

society holds. Indicating such potentialities is exactly where magical realism’s use

could have been transformative in the novel. Bhattacharya and Miéville, for their

commitment to socialist politics, do so in their novels through the strategic use of the

urban fantastic mode, where the current disillusionment is sublated through the

possibility of an irreal class- or caste-based warfare. The rather uncritical and

descriptive use of magic and the dismaying ending may find a further cause in

Rushdie’s cosmopolitan intellectualism which, as Timothy Brennan has noted, is

marked by a broad suspicion of the national-political in resistance-based politics, and

by a foregrounding of the tragic aspects of a hero’s pessimism and loss, apart from

championing the elements of hybridity and liminality.599 To come back to Clare

Barker’s observations, if the postcolonial state of India works through biopolitical

means of normalising the body and disciplining the public, these means were

significantly critiqued and challenged, either by class-/caste- politics such as the

hawkers’ struggle which inspired Bhattacharya’s novel, Kāngāl Mālshāt, or by the

current case of coalition politics and grassroot movements. The lack of any of such

suggestions here makes the political view blinkered and partial. The only optimistic

aspect in the end is the fact that despite Saleem’s death, which may be taken to

represent the death of postcolonial democracy, his body is disintegrated into and

merged with the whole population of the country, suggesting that the ‘disease’ of

optimism in Nehruvian democracy cannot be entirely eliminated by authoritarianism

and dictatorship.

598 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative

(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press 2004), pp. 43-87. 599 See Timothy Brennan for a broader discussion on this, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths

of the Nation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 35-50.

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O. V. Vijayan’s novel, The Saga of Dharmapuri (1987),600 takes up a

grotesque mode for an allegorical reading of the emergency. In his first novel about

the exploration of life by a disillusioned undergraduate drop-out, Khasakkinte

Ithihasam (1969; The Legends of Khasak), Vijayan had already introduced some of

his lifelong interests: the mythical, superstitious, local forms of knowledge production

as against the rational and scientific ordering of the world; the everyday abuse of laws

and rights by political leaders; and the use of deeply philosophical prose punched often

by caustic satire.601 Dharmapuranam, published in English as The Saga of

Dharmapuri in 1987, was written in the early months of 1975 and published only after

the emergency due to the novel’s satirical depiction of the deplorable state of

postcolonial democracy. It is about an aged president-dictator of a recently

postcolonial nation, which announces its power by inviting economically powerful

nations to get involved in its rituals of orgy and feast. The parodic form of the novel

is heavily influenced by contemporary Latin American and African dictator novels.602

It begins with a television show of the national ceremony of the President’s evening

defecation and the distribution of the turds as sacred food. This unnamed nation is

controlled by a strong army that arrests and tortures people at whim, and displays

routinely its armoury and prowess on the street to convince the people that the country

is at peace. The White Confederacy (standing for the US) and the Great Red Tartar

Republic (for Russia) replenish the armouries of Dharmapuri and give the President

candies, in return for which they are given the rights of extracting raw materials and

minerals, and are invited to take part in elaborate feasts, orgies, and the bacchanalia.603

Defecation, food, consumption habits, dead bodies, necrophilia, etc. populate the

novel, and are used in a deeply satirical spirit. Consider this passage:

Food and wine are great equalizers, and the euphoria of banquets has often

encouraged the poorest of the earth’s rulers to stand up to imperial powers; it

is thus that the diplomatic services of decolonized countries have become

dominated by bartenders and chefs. Now, sunk deep in food, wine, and

excrement, Dharmapuri’s President went on to assert that of their two countries

his was the richer in tradition and wisdom. The Great White Father was used

600 O. V. Vijayan, The Saga of Dharmapuri (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1987). 601 Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008). 602 See the examples of Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme, 1974, trans. by Helen Lane (Illinois:

Delkey Archive Press, 2005); Gabriel García Márquez, Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975, trans. by

Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); and Mongo Beti, Perpetua and the Habit of

Unhappiness, trans. by John Reed and Clive Wake (London: Heinemann, 1978). 603 Vijayan, Saga, pp. 17-20.

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to such brag from the tiny presidents and midget emperors who ate at his table,

and would never dispute their claims even while choosing one of their

countries for carpet bombing. He would tell his prospective victim, with much

bowing and clinking of glasses, It is true, Your Tiny Excellency, the New World

has a good deal to learn from your ancient civilization.604

One can hardly miss the satiric punch of how decolonisation has resulted in the rise of

neo-colonialism where the local elites have joined hands with old and new colonial

powers. Satire is deployed mainly through the idea that, rather than the political

principles of autonomy and liberation, it is food and drinks, banquets and bacchanalia

that have inspired the local ruling elites to stand up to imperialism. In fact, autonomy

or independence seems to mean the right to take part in such banquets with the global

ruling powers (suggested through the comparison of diplomats from decolonised

nations to bartenders). It is caustic in the final lines where the postcolonial rulers who

eat and make deals with the Great White Father (the US) are called ‘tiny presidents

and midget emperors’, who have no power of resistance against US imperialism and

violence, except some hollow-sounding faith in the richness of culture and traditions

of Eastern/older societies.

This description of food, defecation, and bodily discourses brings to mind

Bakhtin’s notion of grotesque realism. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin comments

that Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel paints a sixteenth-century world that

includes public use of farting, defecating, eating gluttonously, burping, making lewd

jokes, sex, cannibalism, etc.605 For Bakhtin, these elements and their description

constitute a ‘grotesque realism’ in which the body of the lower-class subject are used

to undermine the hierarchies between high and low, orthodox and unorthodox.606 For

Bakhtin and his readers, the grotesque has a transgressive, emancipatory possibility.607

Vijayan’s world is also set in a distant time, further away from Bakhtin’s sixteenth

century, into a realm of the Indian puranas and epics, as indicated by the names of the

characters (Hayavadana, Mandakini, Laavannya, Aryadatta, etc), their dress codes

604 Ibid, p. 21; emphasis in original. 605 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1984). 606 Ibid, p. 19. 607 Bakhtin, p. 337; Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, Grotesque (London: Routledge, 2013), p.

23.

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(robes, gowns, excessive jewellery, etc.), and their language and conversational

styles.608 But this is also the current time where languages of colonialism, anti-

colonialism, imperialism, dictatorship, subjects, and citizens constitute the everyday

vocabulary. The convergence of disjunctive spaces and times calls to mind Ernst

Bloch’s critical use of the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous.609 Bloch states that

there are two kinds of contradictions in capitalism: synchronous contradiction which

in our contemporary period is between capital and labour, and nonsynchronous

contradiction, which is between the present and those elements that are ‘far from alien

to the present’, including ‘both declining remnants and above all the uncompleted past

which has not been “sublated” by capitalism’.610 By bringing together the synchronous

and nonsynchronous elements, and the ancient, medieval, and modern aspects,

Vijayan seems to suggest that the grotesque has become the dominant living form in

postcolonial India. It is the kings, the queens, and the ruling elites who take part in the

mindless celebration of the excessive, buttressed by the support of the capitalist White

Confederacy and Great Red Tarter Republic, the two most powerful forces in the

world. But whereas in Bakhtin, grotesque performances have a constitutive lower-

class association and carries a trenchant critique and a deliberate subversion of class

privileges and hierarchies, in Vijayan the use of the term appears inverted: it is the

ruling elites who wallow in the excessive and the grotesque. The grotesque stands for

everything that is wrong with the leadership and bureaucracy in the postcolonial

world, for the disillusionment with nation-building in the aftermath of decolonisation.

This is a point that Jed Esty makes in his use of the term ‘excremental

postcolonialism’, through which he speaks of a dominant scatological means of life

608 For example, a representative section would be this dialogue between Siddhartha, a seeker of truth,

and a beggar called Old Mendicant:

‘Master, what do I call you? I do not yet know your name…’

‘Call me Old Mendicant.’

‘Oh, no,’ the native son said, tenderly, I shall call you Mendicant Father.’

The Mendicant smiled once again, and said, ‘You may.’

‘Mendicant Father,’ the native son said, disrobing himself, ‘Look at these limbs of mine, limbs my

starved fathers have bequeathed to me. The large and blond conqueror fulfils my woman.’

‘Yet rejoice and be exceedingly glad,’ the Mendicant said, ‘because there comes another war in which

the victory will be yours, for in that war everyone wins.’ Vijayan, Saga, p. 42. 609 Though Bloch’s idea first appeared in his 1935 work, Erbshaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Maine:

Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1973), he elaborated his views in the article ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation

to Its Dialectics’, New German Critique 11 (1977), 22-38, from which I am referring here. 610 Ibid, p. 31; emphasis in original. Bloch does identify reactionary elements stored in the

nonsynchronous, but he also suggests that the holdover from the nonsynchronous can deliver ‘a part of

the matter that seek a life not destroyed by capital’, p. 34.

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and production in postcolonial societies.611 Through a reading of Joyce and Beckett in

the context of Ireland, and Armah and Soyinka in African nations, Esty contends that

the use of sexual and excremental language in these writers’ descriptions of

bureaucracy and public life reflects a postcolonial disillusionment with nation-

building and national life, where colonial power and overconsumption appear to be

replaced by a neo-colonial politics of vulgarity and violence. Esty’s reading is partly

influenced by Achille Mbmebe’s understanding of the ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ in

postcolonial African societies.612 Mbembe writes that the African postcolony is

marked by ‘commandement’, which is characterised by a theatrical representation of

the grotesque: characteristics such as huge applause for the return of a head of state,

grandiose celebrations of a dictator’s birthday, boastful public display of

achievements, medals won from the state, illegal activities, police protection of the

corrupt, major deals with foreign countries done under the table, excessive lecherous

forms of life, etc.613 For Mbembe, people are complicit in the production of the

grotesque: they participate in these events, disempowering each other and the heads

of state in a show of ‘mutual zombification’.614

These observations point to the representation of postcolonial life in Vijayan’s

novel. A dictator’s regime in a postcolonial society is characterised more by an

individual’s or a small aristocratic group’s benefits and profits than the ‘disciplining’

of the nation for social equality, national prosperity and development. Requested by

the two great nations, the dictator imposes a state of emergency,615 calling for a time

of discipline and control of the body for the betterment of the nation, while he and his

coterie continue to enjoy personal profits, gluttonous feasts, and sex. Written almost

twenty years before Mbembe’s critical account, Vijayan seems to clearly grasp at a

fundamental characteristic of postcolonial societies: dictatorial grotesquery. Vijayan,

however, also makes a crucially different point from Mbembe’s. Mbembe fails to

locate any discourse of resistance to such a self-gratifying commandement regime.

Robert Spencer points out this failure in Mbembe’s work in a recent study of Ngũgĩ

wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and the African dictator novel, where he comments

611 Jed Esty, ‘Excremental Postcolonialism’, Contemporary Literature, 40.1 (1999), 22-59. 612 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 613 Ibid, pp. 115-32. 614 Ibid, p. 104, pp. 110-11. 615 Vijayan, Saga, p. 22.

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that Ngũgĩ uses the trope of public performance to critique the dominant practices and

discourses: ‘the fantastic or magical aspects of a magical realist novel’ offer

decryption or interpretation of the problem of dictatorship and, through their

performative spirit, makes a postcolonial riposte to the elements of crime and

criminality in society.616 In Vijayan’s work, the grotesque is the current postcolonial

condition of being and, as in Bakhtin, a mode of critique of these conditions. The

element of resistance arises in the grotesque again through what Bloch calls the

nonsynchronous element in capitalism. Bloch notes that the task of the critic is ‘to

extrapolate the elements of the nonsynchronous contradiction which are capable of

antipathy and transformation, that is, those hostile to capitalism and [that] are

homeless in it, and to refit them to function in a different context’.617 In the novel, the

nonsynchronous contradiction (which arises from the presence of the remnants or

residues in the dominant) emerges through the character of Siddhartha, the prince and

young Gautama Buddha. Originally from the fourth century BC, Siddhartha, the

symbol of peace and truth, enters Dharmapuri in postcolonial times, which figures as

the land of religious truth and community. He is soon made aware of the social

conditions of the poor, the life of deprivation, torture, and pain. After much

exploration of the nation, he decides to help the people, although the novel does not

make clear in what capacity. The novel’s ending is ambivalent. There is an

insurrection and the rebel ‘proletariats’ lose. Paraashara, one of the rebel leaders, cries

to Siddhartha and tells him that the President’s work-houses, which ‘produce’ and

export human meat to the Western countries, are still intact: ‘See, my King: the

canning of little children! See the slag of their bones float down the river’. Siddhartha

replies: ‘Know them, Paraashara. This is Leela, the play of the Great Delusion, and

they are but wafted along on its tides’.618 Just before this insurgency, in an episode

entitled ‘the Revelation’, Siddhartha is seen to climb ‘a many storeyed edifice rising

616 Robert Spencer, ‘Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African Dictator Novel’, Journal of Commonwealth

Literature, 47.2 (2012), 143-58. Spencer writes, ‘colonialism and its neo-colonial manifestations are

themselves the very epitome of criminality and that justice involves resistance to that power not its

assertion or endorsement’, p. 155. 617 Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism’, p. 33. The past itself is not the solution: ‘Even the possible late ripening

of what is actually incompleted in this past can never turn into a new quality of its own accord, one that

is not already known from the past. That end could be served at best by an alliance, which liberates the

still possible future from the past only by putting both in the present’, p. 36. For a reading of how

Bloch’s use of the synchronicity of the nonsynchronous can be applied to the context of capitalism and

uneven modernity, see Michael Niblett, The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form,

and the Nation-State (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012), pp. 132-74. 618 Vijayan, Saga, pp. 156-57.

198

tier upon tier’ to ask the King of Darkness the purpose of wars. He spots the king as

being ‘a diminutive and decrepit thing that clung to the arches of the cupola […] Its

fangs flashed white in simian chatter and its eyes looked down with imbecile evil’. To

his questions, he just received a hollow sound, ‘Oooooh!’. Siddhartha then turns away

from ‘the demonic void and beg[ins] his toilsome journey of return, a great sadness

upon him, a pure and tender despair’.619 Siddhartha’s reply to Paraashara about the

Great Delusion seems to arise from this episode of self-realisation that there is no

purpose behind wars, torture, and oppression. They are all part of the complex

dimensions of time. The novel ends as Siddhartha’s character turns into a Bodhisattva

tree under which Paraashara is seen sitting: ‘And the weapon, slung over his shoulder,

lay quiet, like a child that had cried itself to sleep’.620 There is a sense of quietude and

pessimism in the end. It is never clear from this ending whether Paraashara, a

proletariat, will see the world from this deep philosophical perspective of

purposelessness, delusion, and fate, or whether he will take a stand against it and

wrestle out the optimistic dimensions of time through struggle and resistance.

However, what seems clear is that there is some sort of a realisation in Paraashara and

this realisation comes from Siddhartha, who has himself been ‘enlightened’ and

transformed (into a tree of knowledge and wisdom in the proletariats’ village) in the

process of his search for peace and truth. There is in Vijayan’s novel then a case of a

messiah who can enlighten the poor (both about resistance and about fatalism) and

prepare them against the meaningless torture and grotesquery of the postcolonial elite.

These suggestions of a bond between the messiah and his followers and of the

possibility of spiritual and total knowledge, remind us of Jayprakash Narayan’s

declaration of ‘total revolution’ against the corrupt Congress government administered

by Indira Gandhi – a revolution of social, moral, economic, political, and

psychological dimensions.621 And herein lies a constitutive difference between

Vijayan’s use of grotesque and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s use of filth as mode of

critique. Filth is used primarily by the lower-caste, lower-class characters as a mode

of social critique, warfare, and resistance; grotesque depicts the living conditions of

the upper class and the upper caste in postcolonial societies. For a proper socialistic

transcendence from the socio-economic conditions of postcolonial authoritarianism,

619 Ibid, p. 154. 620 Ibid, p. 159. 621 On this, see Chandra, pp. 42-45.

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Vijayan seems to suggest that we will need a messiah-like (male) character who is

erudite, patient, and enlightened, and who will educate the poor spiritually – aspects

that are at a far remove from the sudden, irreal, radical guerrilla warfare of the fyatarus

and choktars.622

The politics of resistance from below achieves its most grounded treatment by

far in Arun Joshi’s The City and the River (1990).623 It is a framed narrative where a

young man known as the Nameless-One travels to the mountains to meet a hermit

called Yogeswara, who tells him this current story. Like The Saga of Dharmapuri,

Joshi’s novel is also located in a distant, epical time, in a city called the City of Seven

Hills, surrounded by mountains and where an ancient, sacred river flows. There is a

mythical framework in the novel’s use of kings and queens and their ways of life:

people have ancient names (Bhumiputra, Dharmasena, Vasudeva), titles (the Hermit,

the Astrologer, Grand Master, Minister of Trade, etc.), dress codes, and language. But

they also have components of modern life: newspapers, guns and jeeps, helicopters,

tape recorders and radios, limousines, etc.624 Much as Vijayan had, Joshi also uses a

mythical mode to represent the deep unevenness of postcolonial society, where, as

Jameson has noted, disjunctive times and spaces are forced together due to

capitalism’s and imperialism’s violent dismantling of older economic and cultural

modes.625 But Joshi does not duplicate Vijayan’s grotesque mode, nor does he use

622 Vijayan continued to write fiction, especially short stories, about the emergency and the resistance

from below, which he called ‘allegories of power’. See his self-translated story collection, especially

the first four stories, After the Hanging and Other Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989). 623 Arun Joshi, The City and the River (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1994). 624 Ibid, p. 24, p. 55, p. 110. 625 In his essay, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Jameson argues that

third-world texts are locked ‘in a life-and-death struggle with the first world cultural imperialism’, and

suggests that we should not only compare texts based on their literary properties, but also ‘the concrete

situations from which those texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses’. The

postcolonial texts, for the violent histories of the societies that they are born in, are marked by ‘generic

discontinuities’. Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text,

15 (1986), 65-88 (pp. 86-87). Neil Lazarus tells us that this insight was first developed by Marx and

then amplified significantly by Leon Trotsky in the 1930s based on the latter’s consideration of the

conditions in Russia in 1905 and China in 1925-27, which led Trotsky to formulate the ‘law of the

uneven and combined development’. For Trotsky, the commodity modes of production and the

capitalist class relations do not supplant the pre-existing modes and structures, but capitalism is forcibly

conjoined with them, creating a ‘contradictory amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’.

This process of amalgamation also corresponds to Ernst Bloch’s concept of the ‘synchronicity of the

nonsynchronous’. Lazarus takes from these insights to understand the fundamentally uneven character

of postcolonial society and culture. See Neil Lazarus, ‘What Postcolonial Theory doesn’t Say’, Race

and Class, 53.1 (2011), 3-27 (p. 13).

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mythical or fantastic elements in a magical realist mode to alter the course of reality.626

The narrative is primarily about socio-economic and physical oppression from the top,

and the struggle and resistance from below. The narrative begins with a dream of the

Grand Master, the would-be-king, about ‘a child from the rubbish’ who will be the

cause of his death. The Master thus calls for his ministers and devises a strict law of

family planning for the ‘mud people’, the lower-class people who live at the fringes

of the city, mostly the boatmen (fishermen) living close to the river.627 This planning

soon turns into routine checks by soldiers for any new-born children in the mud houses

and later into forced sterilisation campaigns. A teacher, Bhumiputra, who is

enlightened by the prophecy of one Hermit that this city will soon fall, stands against

these laws, and is extended support by the boatmen. Later, the protest turns into an

armed struggle between the Master’s forces and the lower sections of the society,

accompanied by a section of the bourgeoisie, until the river floods and destroys the

city. Unlike in the previous novel which provides a generalised take on postcolonial

governance and dictatorship, there are a number of references in this novel that situate

the novel’s historical trajectory within that of the emergency period. The Grand

Master’s family-planning initiative is a direct reference to the forced sterilisation

scheme of Gandhi’s government. There are a couple of newspapers, maintained by the

state, which glorify the state’s current laws and policies, and spread venomous news

against the conspirators, Bhumiputra and the boatmen.628 This refers to the newspaper

Samachar, the Gandhi government’s official daily propaganda organ.629 Later on in

the novel, when the resisting forces stand up against the ruler, the Dragnet laws came

into effect,630 which allow the authorities to arrest people at whim, torture them in

prison, and keep secret files on them. These laws recall the measures taken during the

emergency under the Defence of India Act (1971) and the Maintenance of Internal

Security Act (MISA). Just before the battle, soldiers descend from helicopters and

demolish the brick and mud houses with gigantic machines,631 again a reference to

Gandhi’s slum clearance programme. But unlike Rushdie who has no faith in class

626 On the use of myths in magical realism, see Donald L. Shaw, ‘The Presence of Myth in Borges,

Carpentiar, Asturias, Rulfo and García Márquez’, in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. by Stephen

M. Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang (Suffolk: Tamesis, 2005), pp. 46-54. 627 Joshi, City, p. 12. 628 Ibid, p. 88. 629 On this, see Sorabjee, 1977, pp. 12-21, who captured the state of press censorship during the

emergency and the role Samachar played in official propaganda. 630 Joshi, City, p. 121. 631 Ibid, p. 183.

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struggle, or Vijayan who shows revolutionary class consciousness to be at the nascent

stage only, Joshi gives us a picture that the lower classes are not only politically

conscious, they also actively voice their demands and fight for them. When, in a public

speech on family-planning laws, the boatmen are asked to swear allegiance to the

Grand Master by the Astrologer, the Second Head of State, for keeping peace and

social equality in the nation, the Head Boatman, a woman, responds,

Is it not true, Astrologer, that the city’s granaries are full? And it is not a fact

that out of the mud-people the city shall always extract work equal to what it

feeds them, even as it is done to the animals, even though that cannot be said

of the brick-people and of their children?... You said the wealth of the city

belongs to the people. Let the Grand Master ask the brick-people to give up

their wealth […] Let the city’s wealth be put to use for the benefit of all. Let

the boatmen’s children have an equal chance with the children of the brick-

people […] If the city still remains poor we shall gladly give up our children.632

This statement shows that the mud-people, the lower classes, are aware of the nature

of deprivation, of workers’ rights and duties, and of the socio-economic divide

between the labour classes, the brick-people (bureaucratic/middle-classes) and the

aristocracy. The lower classes are not afraid to protest against the status quo. The novel

slowly builds up the momentum of struggle through the display of hegemonic and

repressive practices by the state, and through the acts of class solidarity and

underground and public instances of struggle put up by the lower classes, until it

finally culminates in revolution. However, the author prevents us from seeing a seizure

of state power by the proletariat. The city is destroyed by an ominous flood in a

mythical, divine act. The reference to the seven hills and the mud people remind us of

the Roman Empire and the rise of republicanism, while the flood is probably an

allusion to the Biblical flood ordered by God to cleanse humanity of its evils and sins.

The novel’s revolutionary build-up and class-character also call to mind many features

of the French Revolution: the class coalition of resistance groups comprising teachers,

lawyers, educators, cobblers, peasants, and fishermen; the nature of their attack,

destroying the property of the state through everyday tools; the hanging and beheading

of the ruling elites; etc. Since a section of the ruling classes in this novel does help the

lower classes to settle their own conflicts and manoeuvre the current state of affairs

632 Ibid, p. 20.

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for their own benefit, the novel seems to reject the building of a revolutionary socialist

state from this political coalition. But Joshi does not end the novel with the flood and

the prospect of complete annihilation. Rather, it ends with the current-time narrative

as Yogeswara tells the Nameless-One that another city has risen from the ashes of the

old one, higher on the mountains: that city has another Grand Master, with newer

technology and arms, and newer mechanisms of repression and torture. The Nameless-

One is asked to go and teach the boatmen purity and sacrifice, to take up the role of

Bhumiputra and lead the peasants to another organised act of resistance. The

Nameless-One asks, ‘How can I succeed where the Hermit [who is possibly

Yogeswara himself] failed?’, to which Yogeswara replies, ‘The question is not of

success or failure; the question is of trying. And it is not your success that we are

speaking of but the city’s. The city must strive once again for purity. But purity can

come only through sacrifice. That perhaps was the meaning of the boatmen’s

rebellion’.633 Rather than totally dismissing the possibilities held by solidarity-based

politics or resistances from below, Joshi presents us with a framework where power,

domination, and resistance appear interconnected and historical. At the same time, it

could also be argued that such a stance could be taken with a relative distance from

the event. Vijayan’s novel was written before the emergency and calls for a messianic

redemption from the chaotic and torturous politics of Gandhi just prior to the

emergency. Rushdie’s is one of dejection and dismay over the disillusioning turn of

events in Gandhi’s return to power. Joshi, writing more than a decade from the event

when the Janata government has already come to power for the second time, suggests

through Yogeswara’s words that one has to continue to organise and resist the

dominant frameworks. The point is not to achieve immediate success, but to have faith

in solidarity- and struggle-based politics.

Critical Realism I, or Realism from Above

A critique of the emergency appears most cogently in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like

Us (1985).634 Sahgal’s novel shows that the emergency condition was a ruse for the

nation’s elite to court multinational capitalism, to make individual profit, to overlook

corruption in bureaucracy and politics, and to destroy the prospects of indigenous

633 Ibid, p. 263. 634 Nayantara Sahgal, Rich Like Us (London: Heinemann, 1985).

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economic development. She builds this picture through the characters of Sonali and

Rose. Sonali, a civil servant who has been brought up with the Nehruvian values of

democracy, collective work, and social justice, has been humiliatingly demoted and

transferred because of her refusal to sign and release the contract papers for the

Happyola drinks factory, an enterprise that she considers ‘totally unnecessary’ in

India’s current economic condition.635 Rose, a conscientious Englishwoman from a

working-class background (Cockney) married to an Indian businessman, Ram, in pre-

independence times and now settled in Delhi, has a corrupt stepson Dev, who works

for the government’s elite car manufacturing project and attempts to disown Rose from

Ram’s family property. Both Sonali and Rose belong to the elite social classes,

(though Rose is a working-class Londoner and is not formally educated), have ‘top-

level’ contacts, and are independent and strong-willed women. But they are also

removed from the centre of activity and, as we will see, suffer from their failed

idealisms.636 The narrative, built through a combination of rational analysis and

emotional expressivity, and qualified by Sahgal’s liberal feminist values as well as her

experience in political commentary and journalism,637 appears to be closer to the

analytical-emotive mode in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers!. Indeed,

Sahgal’s ending of the novel, which can be interpreted as a display of her faith in the

redemptive dimension of India’s cosmopolitan heritage, has resonance in

Bhattacharya’s utopian-socialistic ending. But Sahgal’s gendered liberal-

cosmopolitan take on the emergency departs crucially from Bhattacharya’s mode.

Where the devastating conditions caused by the famine (emaciated people

everywhere, corpses on the street, etc.) determined Bhattacharya’s analytical

(documentary) emotive style, the impact of the emergency in Sahgal’s novel derives

from its neo-colonial drive for ‘modernisation’, which exploits India’s lower classes

and the resources available to them for the sole profit of the nation’s ruling elite and

foreign investors. Coercion (family planning) and consent-making (the complicity of

the middle classes and the intellectuals) are integral to this brand of class-based ruling.

635 Ibid, p. 24. 636 Joya Uraizee notes these features and tells us that they suffer from a ‘tremendous sense of isolation’.

Uraizee, There is No Place for a Woman: Nadine Gordimer, Nayantara Sahgal, Buchi Emecheta and

the Politics of Gender (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), p. 88. 637 Teresa Hubel comments that the structure and tone of Sahgal’s novels are deeply shaped by her

politics of liberal feminism. Hubel, ‘The Politics of the Poor and the Limits of Feminist Individualism

in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us’, in Nayantara Sahgal’s India: Passion, Politics, and History, ed.

by Ralph Crane (New Delhi: Sterling, 1998), pp. 78-96.

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Against this, she proposes a cosmopolitan understanding of Indian culture, history,

and cross-cultural values that has a much older basis than the current understanding

of cosmopolitanism. This is substantially broader and wider than Bhattacharya’s male-

oriented, bourgeois, nationalist reading of transcendence and utopia after

independence, which, as I argued, was used to redeem the deep bourgeois social and

moral crisis in the ‘stormy’ decade of the 1940s. Sahgal’s critique is also closer to

Devi’s mode of historical analysis. Sahgal’s narrator, as we will shortly see, is

historically sensitive and analytical, just like Devi’s narrator who explores like a

historian/sociologist the wider historical reasons for jotedar violence, state

indifference, and lack of sympathy and love for the tribal during the peasant

insurgencies in the aftermath of independence. Both writers also bend and disrupt the

linear progress of time to situate their politics of peripherality. For Devi, it is Brati and

Bashai who wage war against the upper-class, upper-caste babus (we must bear in

mind the class and caste differences between Brati and Bashai themselves, of course).

To give them voice and place within the main narrative, she fractures the linear realist

discourses, and constructs both a quest mode and a deeply analytical and critical

irrealist framework. For Sahgal, it is the rationally-minded, liberal, and sensitive

upper-class, upper-caste women who are in a tangential relation to the masculine

bureaucratic-political-business world. This is, I argue, a crucial element. In Rich Like

Us, as well as in Raj Gill’s Torch Bearer (1983)638 and in Manohar Malgonkar’s The

Garland Keepers (1986),639 which for reasons of space I am not able to discuss here,

what is particularly noticeable is the writers’ clearly upper-class, upper-caste

concerns: they focus on the lives of bureaucrats, ministers, big businessmen, and

upper-class women, as well as their lifestyles, top-tier business deals, conspiracies,

challenges, etc. The protagonists do register the lower classes and communities around

them and how their lives are affected by the emergency, but they are so preoccupied

638 Raj Gill, Torch-Bearer: A Novel (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1983). This is a novel about a girl

from a village, Alvika, who after a turn of events becomes the prime minister of India. Through the

generic mixture of Bildungsroman and adventure romance, Gill tells us of the corrupt nature of cabinet

ministers and bureaucracy which forces the prime minister to call for the emergency. There is a strong

gender-based critique of the emergency here, which is however complicated through the adventure

romance format where Alvika’s transformation is understood to be driven by her personal tragedies and

her lack of love and companion in life. 639 Manohar Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers (New Delhi: Rupa, 2013). Malgonkar’s novel is a crime

thriller where a journalist and an intelligence officer attempt to uncover the conspiracies and evil nexus

between top-level bureaucrats, millionaire businessmen, famous gurus and yogis, and cabinet ministers.

It is based on the corruption related to the car scam. The rendering of the administrative and bureaucratic

world of the emergency is Kafkaesque in its symbolic and maze-like quality.

205

with their own concerns (or with the idea of saving the country) that the lower classes

become of secondary importance. Their critique (in Rich) is directed from a

cosmopolitan, liberal feminist, Nehruvian perspective. These class-based values

appear to shape Sahgal’s critique of the emergency as well as her critical realist mode.

As Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece and Indira Gandhi’s cousin, Nayantara Sahgal

grew up in a socially and politically elite family with a rich historical legacy in anti-

colonial struggles; she knew Indira Gandhi very well. She looked up to Nehru as her

role model.640 This is most evident in the novel, A Situation in New Delhi (1977),

which begins with the ominous statement, ‘Shivraj was dead’.641 Shivraj here is a foil

for Nehru, whose death, the novel shows, brings forth a regime of political

manoeuvring and conspiracies within the Congress Party, and an unstoppable rise in

social chaos, political agitation, and violence. In Rich Like Us, this aspect is forwarded

through the consciousness of Sonali. Sonali joins the civil services, like many of her

civil servant compatriots, with the Nehruvian dream of building the nation: ‘“We”

were bound by more than a discipline. We partook of a mystique. Our job was to stay

free of the political circus’.642 But she soon realises that this tradition, this zeal and

fervour for collectivised nation-building is no longer applicable – the idea that ‘so long

as I handled my files properly and made the right recommendations’643, change for the

better would come. There has already been a sea-change in politics and governance.

Politicians now use a corrupt bureaucracy to forge private relations with big business

(Sonali identifies this corruption in the character of Ravi Kachru, a top-level

bureaucrat who was once her fiancé). Civil services are a bargaining medium between

multinational companies, such as the Happyola drinks factory which plans to set up a

factory in India, and a welcoming state that implements market economy through

political authoritarianism and the crushing of all democratic dissent. This realisation

has a particular global context. After the post-1945 ‘boom’ period, marked by a

historic compromise between capital and labour, from the 1960s onward there was a

640 In both her autobiographies, Prison and Chocolate Cake (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954) and From

Fear Set Free (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962), Nehru appears to be a consummate conciliator of the

ancient Indian virtues of tolerance, patience, and learning, and of the modern European values of reason,

development, and democracy. See also in this context her biography by Ritu Menon, especially the first

chapter. Menon, Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal (Delhi: Fourth

Estate, 2014), pp. 3-50. 641 Nayantara Sahgal, A Situation in New Delhi (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 5. 642 Sahgal, Rich, p. 24. 643 Ibid, p. 31.

206

wide stagnation in economic growth, fundamentally a mark of the final

incompatibility between capitalist class relations and social democracy. As Neil

Lazarus writes, ‘The various socio-economic contradictions that had been masked and

exacerbated by the social democratic class compromise of Fordism began (once again)

in the late 1960s and early 1970s to stage themselves as the sites of open

confrontation’.644 This required, for the capitalist core nations, an entire ‘economic

restructuring’, both in terms of social relations of production, and of technological

dimensions of production. For the postcolonial nations, in the early years after

decolonisation (mostly the 1950s and the 1960s), there was a dominant atmosphere of

happiness, of ‘heady expectancy, dynamism, a sense of uplift and vibrant

hopefulness’.645 But as the period of expansion ended sometime between 1968 and

1971, Samir Amin tells us, the world system entered a phase of structural crisis, with

falling rates of profit in industrial nations, unemployment, inflation, and attendant

social crises.646 The postcolonial nations, which had been depending on foreign debt,

faced the rigours of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) imposed in the wake of

‘economic restructuring’ of the core capitalist nations. This period in India, as we

noted in the previous chapter, was marked by wide unemployment, inflation, industrial

recession, poverty, and squalor, as well as the concentration of wealth in a few hands.

As famine and starvation conditions became widespread, Gandhi and her Congress

Party began to borrow food-grains and chemical fertilisers from the US. This drive

gave birth to the Green Revolution in India, but resulted not in equitable social

distribution of wealth, but rather class entrenchment of the rich farmers. When the US

terminated aid, the debt-ravaged economy had to face stringent measures from

international financial institutions, which came in the manner of huge cuts in

government spending; opening up of local markets for imported goods and social

644 Neil Lazarus, ‘The Global Dispensation since 1945’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial

Literary Studies, ed. by Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 19-40 (p.

23). 645 Ibid, p. 31. Lazarus captures the bourgeois-nationalist developments of the period cogently: ‘The

newly inaugurated postcolonial regimes undertook all manner of ambitious projects intended to

improve the livelihood and welfare of their citizenry, from literacy and adult education campaigns to

the construction and provision of hospitals, from the building of roads and sewage facilities to vast

irrigation schemes (as most notably in the Sudan, for instance), and from the redistribution of land to

the outlawing of feudal rights over the labour of others. Here women were granted the right to vote, and

to own property. There, workers were granted the right to organize and strike. Still, elsewhere

compulsory education of children was introduced. Constitutions were framed; new laws were passed;

many tyrannical and bitterly resented colonial laws and edicts were struck down’ (p. 34). 646 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society

(London: Zed, 1997), p. 147.

207

services; the removal of all restrictions on foreign investment; and deregulation in all

sectors to ensure that all developments are driven by the logic of the market rather

than by social need or government policy.647 This was the beginning of market

economy in India installed through the links with the civil services and an authoritarian

nature of the government – a nature, Sahgal notes, which was marked by a

combination of populist rhetoric, the debilitation of the Party system, the

encouragement of mistrust amongst senior members, and the concentration of power.

These features, she argues, were absent in Gandhi’s predecessors, and prepared the

grounds for the state of emergency to arrive in a constitutional democracy.648

Rich Like Us begins in this historical conjuncture when free marketeering was

given the green light in India. In the opening pages we are shown that there is a deal

taking place in Dev’s house. Dev is a businessman’s son who is not interested in

continuing his father’s garment and boutique business, but wants a short cut to riches

and power by acting as an ‘entrepreneur’. In this episode, he facilitates a negotiation

between the government and a foreign investor, Mr. Neuman, who plans to buy land

in the outskirts of Delhi. Rose knows of Dev’s weak business acumen and is suspicious

of his blind faith in the entrepreneurship-based free-market model of business.

Although she is not formally educated, she has learnt from her father-in-law and her

husband that there is no alternative to hard work and good customer relations in

business. Dev’s wife Nishi supports her husband and promotes his agenda. In the

opening lines of the novel, Sahgal problematises the postcolonial ruling elite’s ready

welcome of the free market through the device of irony:

647 On this, see Francine Frankel, ‘Compulsion and Social Change: Is Authoritarianism the Solution to

India’s Economic Development Problems’, in The State and Development in the Third World, ed. by

Atul Kohli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 143-68; for the coercive installation

of SAPs in the Third World by the US-led financial institutions, see Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham,

and Bill Rau, Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty (London: Pluto, 1999), p. 27. 648 Consider this passage: ‘Mrs Gandhi’s style arises out of values fundamentally different from those

of her two predecessors, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri. The essence of Indian politics in

their time was the recognition that India needed the democratic process for the education, integration,

and development of her large and diverse society […] Under Mrs Gandhi, this climate, along with the

political structures it involved, the debate and dissent it had encouraged, and the human give-and-take

it had engendered, both within the ruling party and between the ruling party and the Opposition, began

to be eroded. The creation of a highly centralized governing apparatus and party machine under her

personal command and the growth of a personality cult were accompanied by assaults on the

institutional framework of democracy. The emergency of 1975-77 provided the setting for a one-party

system, hugely enlarged executive powers, and a dynastic succession’. Nayantara Sahgal, Indira

Gandhi, p. xiii.

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The richer the host, the later dinner was served. Dining late was a status

symbol, like Scotch whiskey, five times the price of Indian, and the imported

car, a particularly costly luxury, that had brought him here from the hotel. ‘The

first thing those local elites do – not to mention their presidents or generals or

whoever’s at the top – is to get themselves the biggest, latest model foreign

cars,’ he had been told in his briefing before this trip, ‘and why not? We like

the way we live. We can’t blame them for wanting to live like us. Besides, it’s

what makes them ready to buy what we have to sell.’

‘Won’t you have another drink, Mr. Neuman?’ his hostess offered.

‘I still have some, thank you.’

‘It’s Scotch.’649

Note the similarity in the description of the postcolonial elite between this novel and

the episode we referred to in Vijayan’s The Saga of Dharmapuri, in which the

postcolonial elite and government heads appears to brag about their culture and

wisdom to their neo-colonial merchant friends and to engage in a politics of individual

profit-seeking. Both Sahgal and Vijayan focus on the element of eating and drinking

excessively. Importing trendy and expensive material from the West and sharing it

with the elite from the West is a symbol of prestige and culture for the postcolonial

elites. It serves as a declaration that, despite centuries of colonisation, the postcolonial

elites walk the same line on economic power and culture as their erstwhile Western

overlords. The excessive displays of wealth and sex and the use of emergency

measures to fulfil the conditions for their profitable businesses appear to be

characteristic of the Indian postcolonial ruling elite. Despite these connections, there

are also important differences in their use of literary modes. Vijayan employs the

grotesque where excess, waste, and bodily practices (sexual-libidinal as well as legal-

political) are captured through the necromantic and excremental use of the body. His

mode choice is shaped by his vision that these elements are integral to postcolonial

Indian society and that we would need a JP-like messiah figure to cleanse us through

a total revolution. Sahgal’s philosophy and politics, as we have been arguing, are

different. The main object of her critique is not the postcolonial elite’s excessive use

of wealth and body, but rather how the ruling elites combine and use force to make

space for foreign investment and class rule. Sonali knows that this constitutional

649 Sahgal, Rich, p. 7.

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emergency has no basis. A crisis born out of political and economic instability can be

effectively controlled if politics and civil services are made to run separately and run

well. There have been bigger emergencies in the past: ‘They [the civil servants] [have]

dealt with all kinds, partition, famine, war, refugees on a scale so monumental it made

refugees of all disasters till then and many after look like minor migrations’.650 Rather,

this emergency is an entrenchment of class, a consolidation of dynastic rule: ‘We were

all taking part in a thinly disguised masquerade, preparing the stage for family rule’.651

This rule is maintained by the current blurring of civil services and politics, and by the

new style of governance where corruption and authoritarianism go hand in hand. She

can now see that many of the events that she has recently witnessed, private and public

– from her demotion and the nationalisation of banks to the crushing of all political

dissent and the populism of ‘garibi hatao’ – are just part of a bigger plan of the

constitutional emergency to prepare the way to the entry of direct foreign investment

in India and to discipline the postcolonial public: ‘The same soundless nudge that

handed me in the ditch had carted thousands off to jail, swept hundreds more out of

sight to distant ‘colonies’ to live, herded as many like animals to sterilisation

centres’.652 She can see that there is a takeover of the state apparatus by a new

economically ‘liberal’ class fraction, and that the Indian public does not rise up in

protest at this (local) takeover. Sonali is ‘amazed’: ‘What if there was a collective will

to cowardice, when men and women in their millions, a whole nationful, did cowardly

deeds? Was there a way out of that?’.653 Although Sonali is not entirely correct here,

since, as we have seen in the previous chapter, there have been a number of peasant

insurgencies and labour militancy against the (global) structural coercion, this is

exactly what the emergency was meant to be: a rule of terror through coercion and

consent to pave way for the easy transition to market economy. As Dev says to

Neuman, now that the country is under emergency laws, ‘things can go full steam

ahead without delays and weighing pros and cons for ever’.654

In many of her lectures and essays given between the late 1980s and late 1990s,

Sahgal points out this current form of global governance where every society,

650 Ibid, p. 26. 651 Ibid, p. 26. 652 Ibid, p. 28. 653 Ibid, p. 30. 654 Ibid, p. 8.

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impoverished by imperialism and colonialism, is made to serve the West (US) through

its submission to the ‘free’ market. She writes: ‘who we are, is further complicated by

the fact that the west is still The World and we are more shadow than substance [...]

and now this new empire, of managers of the global economy, who warn us we will

have no existence unless we toe the line’.655 Through Dev, and Ravi, the civil servant,

Sahgal depicts India’s gradual opening to the forces of capitalist globalisation. Dev

considers himself an entrepreneur who is helping to make India modern, and is aware

of the profits that he can make easily. Rose knows that in Dev’s promotion of

entrepreneurship, which involves no hard work or no commitment on his part to land,

property or nation, there is no business but mainly the looting of money from the

public: ‘the business is minding itself and you are sitting pretty with the loot’.656

Sahgal clearly suggests that this model is a new form of imperialism where the global

ruling elites and the postcolonial ruling elites work together to exploit territories and

resources through authoritarianism. This new imperialism works through a new form:

a total subservience to technology. As Sahgal writes in one of her essays, countries in

the Third World are slaves to the new empire of globalised capitalism: ‘The new

imperialism is an absentee push-button affair and involves no human presence at all,

only profits’.657 Push-button refers to the wide geographical control through

technology that characterises this global form of imperialism. In the novel, Sahgal

calls this a ‘turn-key’ economy. In the meeting with Neuman, Ravi tells everyone that

the country is now shifting towards an advanced economy where one will have to just

turn the key and all ‘secrets of ownership, control, importance’ will be out in a minute.

This suggests the simultaneous rise of entrepreneurship and digital technology which

is constitutive of the current stage of market economy. This rise indicates the new

economic turn towards the service industry, where management of data and of human

resources is of paramount importance rather than the traditional capitalist resources of

labour and land.658

Sahgal subjectivises the social relations derived from this data-based,

numerical, quantifiable quality of economy through the compartmentalisation of the

655 Sahgal, Point of View: A Personal Response to Life, Literature, and Politics (Delhi: Prestige, 1997),

p. 85. 656 Sahgal, Rich, p. 11. 657 Sahgal, Point, p. 88. 658 In postcolonial societies, ‘service industry’ is usually taken to refer to financial services, hospitality,

retail, health, human services, information technology, and education.

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body. When Nishi explains this hard work as ‘public relations’, Rose is outraged: ‘I’m

not talking about public bloody relations. I’m talking about human beings […] Like

there don’t seem to be any more’.659 Rose here is talking about the substantial, human-

based, transactional business model, which her father-in-law and her husband have

followed and promoted. Although Ram’s boutique market has clients from the US, we

are told a little later by the narrator that the US clients (the Goldfinkels) have visited

them and are sympathetic to their cause. They are wary of the current deterioration in

the quality of garments and Dev’s indifference to the business after Ram’s paralysis.

This clientele-based globalised economy, characteristic of the Nehruvian protective

state, is being transformed into an economy based on entrepreneurship, facilitation,

public relations, data, and management. There is no human warmth in social relations,

even between capitalists of different orders in the chain of commands. Humans are but

numbers. This element is suggested through the constant reference to names, features,

and compartmentalised parts of the body in the opening pages of the novel. Except for

Neuman (who is meant to be the proper noun, New Man, for multinational capitalism),

Sahgal’s narrator never names the characters – they are addressed as host, hostess,

mother-in-law, etc. Nishi, Dev’s wife, is described thus: ‘her hostess was curled up on

the sofa, tiny and elegant in her airy cotton sari’; ‘“He’s making a people’s car”’, spoke

light and bright from the sofa’; ‘“Mum’s right”, said the sofa voice’ etc.660 Nishi is not

a human being, but a token of the upper class lifestyle, expensive, elegant, and

desirable. Later, as her character develops into a sensitive woman who tries

desperately to save her father-in-law’s garment business, she is caring about Rose and

supportive of her husband, despite knowing his weak business sense and short-

tempered nature. Blindfolded by Dev’s reasoning, she supports the emergency

measures, until her own father, K. L. (Kishori Lal) is imprisoned under the

government’s harsh economic policies. Sahgal’s narrator shows the change of

character in her defiance to Dev:

‘If he’s [K. L.’s] lucky enough to get release, he’ll have to mend his ways –’

‘Stop!’ commanded Nishi in a voice like the savage scream she remembered

at the end of her indescribable effort before her body was delivered of her two

children, the crowning of the only two acts of her life there had been no

659 Ibid, p. 11. 660 Ibid, pp. 7-12.

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stopping until the bitter end. Except for these she had always known pity and

reprieve.661

Nishi has never been so commanding and defiant in the narrative. The comparison to

her painful and bitter experience of childbirth serves to suggest the depth of her rage.

Indeed, the image here also reminds us of Devi’s Mother of 1084, especially Sujata’s

pain of childbirth in her protest against her husband that she will not be pressed to give

birth again, and her final defiance of ‘savage scream’ in the end of the narrative. Here,

in Nishi’s characterisation, her initial introduction to the reader as a light and bright,

elegant, and desirable creature seems to carry Sahgal’s mordant sense of irony, since

Nishi uses her body as a commodity to save Dev from financial ruin. Her job is to

please Mr. Neuman, and so she never enters the conversation other than offering him

a drink or supporting her husband’s point of view. The shift to a new economy requires

not only the commodification of the human body, but also of a correct presentation of

the body, a correct style of public relations. It is only through imitating this new form

of imperialism and this new style of public relations that, Neuman thinks ‘they’d be

rich like us’.662

If managerial take-over and technological dominance are understood as

characteristic features of market economy (under political authoritarianism), the

coercive and consensual nature of authoritarianism are made clear through the vivid

depiction of oppressive conditions and the instances of class-collaboration during the

emergency. In no other novel of the period does the emergency appear with such

vividness. There is presence of all the major features we noted in the introductory

paragraphs – the gagging of the press, the twenty-point programme, the car-

manufacturing scandal, the ‘excesses’ of slum clearance, and vasectomy – and also of

the everyday ones – the sudden transfer of honest civil servants, the abrupt

imprisonment of citizens, and the secret murdering of those who question the

workings. The imposing presence of these features creates what O. P. Mathur calls a

‘nausea of totalitarianism’ in the novel.663 I will limit my discussion to the

representation of family planning during the emergency in order to understand the

nature of class-collaboration and Sahgal’s realist critique of it. At the beginning of the

661 Ibid, p. 206. 662 Sahgal, Rich, p. 14. 663 O. P. Mathur. ‘The Nausea of Totalitarianism. A Note on Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us’, World

Literature Today, 65.1 (1991), 68-71.

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second chapter, the narrator comments, ‘It did not need much imagination to sense the

hate and fear inside the vans with iron-barred windows, like the ones used for

collecting stray dogs for drowning, that now roamed the streets picking up citizens for

vasectomy’.664 These lines evoke a pervasive atmosphere of terror and fear regarding

sterilisation. As Emma Tarlo noted, this atmosphere was so dominant that some of her

target participants thought of the emergency specifically as ‘nasbandi ka vakt’ (the

time of sterilisation).665 What is particularly striking about this sentence is the irony in

the word citizen. The image of coercively drowning a dog is already stifling, but now

even humans are collected for this. They are not to be killed but sterilised, and in the

state’s frenetic drive, to be effectively disabled. These humans are called citizens. But

who are these citizens that the novel’s vasectomy campaigners capture? They are the

lower class and lower caste people who the government considers are fit to be

sterilised.666 That the family planning programme has a specific class basis is best

understood in the scene where Ravi, a representative of the government, arranges a

meeting for the ‘New Entrepreneurs’ wives’ on women’s participation in vasectomy

and family planning, and on women’s role in nation-building. Nishi, who is tasked

with chairing the meeting, asks the women to tender their views on how ‘to popularise

the Twenty Point Programme [… and] make the emergency more successful’, to

which Leila, a prominent upper class socialite, instantly responds, ‘Birth Control’.667

She tells the group that she has come to know from a reliable source that teachers have

been given the directive to have a target number of people sterilised by a specific

period or else they will be dismissed. This is historically true as teachers, clerks,

government service holders, and middle class women, deemed sincere and trustworthy

to take care of the nation’s birth control problem, were forced with a target-based

scheme (and, if failing to meet the targets, would lose their jobs).668 This class basis

of the family planning agenda has been pointed out by several scholars, in terms of

how the Indian government actively sought ‘middle class collaboration’ to stage

‘popular consent’ for the twenty-point programme.669 The middle class was tasked to

664 Ibid, p. 23. 665 Tarlo, Unsettling, p. 242. 666 It should be mentioned here that the caste question emerges strongly in the treatment of class, but

Sahgal fails to focalise it. She writes elsewhere, ‘I prefer to think of my fiction as having a sense of

history in a country where race, religion or caste can decide the course of a love affair’, yet hardly is

caste foregrounded her social imagination. See Point, p. 97. 667 Sahgal, Rich, p. 78. 668 Hewitt, Mobilisation, p. 140. 669 Hewitt, p. 128; Aravind Rajagopal, p. 1003.

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teach the lower classes the benefits of birth control and thus to help abolish poverty.

Gangadharan, Joshy, and Balakrishnan, in their sociological study (1978), inform us

that the policy of family planning was related to the eradication of poverty. But forced

sterilisation and cases of disabling or even killing people through this programme

meant that the policy was carried out less to eradicate poverty than to ‘eliminate the

poor’.670 As Leila’s statement regarding the teachers indicates, there was no structured

programme of awareness building or gradual execution of plans, only a forced

success-failure schema. Rebecca Williams points out the strong eugenic ideological

current in family planning. For her, the rigorous attitude with the birth control policy

came from the state’s ‘authoritarian high modernism’. The family planning

programme, which was understood by the Shah Commission, the committee

investigating the crimes of the emergency, as an ‘excess’ committed during the

emergency, was rather ‘a product of the combination of a demographic discourse with

a modernising impulse’.671 The state’s aspirations for modernising the economy led to

policies that attempted to control population and eradicate poverty, but this

modernisation had a demographic aim – it was specifically directed at domestic

servants, slum dwellers, and the urban poor who were regarded as active agents for

the nation’s economic downfall.672 Modernisation and class collaboration, therefore,

worked to intensify the stereotypical notions the middle classes have of the poor and

the uneducated. This is relevant to the aforementioned quote about the vans with iron-

barred windows. The only citizen that the vans have picked up for sterilisation is a

disabled beggar (additionally, Nishi considers her servant Kumar a possible

candidate). There is no mention of anyone from the middle or upper class requiring

sterilisation, none from the group of women taking up the mantle of saving the nation

from population inflation. Rose exposes these underlying class assumptions in family

planning clearly when, in a conversation with Nishi and her friends at a lunch

gathering in her house, she questions Leila’s reason for considering it ethically

inappropriate for her domestic servants to watch a love-making or kissing scene on

television. Rose tells them the story of one of her rural servants: how the police

routinely torture them for crop tax for the local landlords, how they kill men and rape

670 Gangadharan K., P. J. Koshy, and C. N. Radhakrishnan, The Inquisition: Revelations before the

Shah Commission (New Delhi: Path Publishers 1978), p. 33. 671 Rebecca Williams, ‘Storming the Citadels’, (p. 477. 672 Ibid, p. 489.

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women, and how this servant’s wife was raped and then secretly transported to ‘one

of those brick-kiln-pig-hole places along the Ganges’.673 For Rose, these servants have

been victims of rape and organised violence by the upper caste and class since the

inception of history. If the poor happen to be a problem for population rise, the reason

does not lie in their watching and learning from television, but in a wider system of

oppression and uneven development. The middle and upper classes hold the power,

contribute to this situation, and remain protected. Rose adds that if anything happens

to the people of the upper classes, ‘The militia will be out looking for the rascal’.674

The ‘modernising impulses’ of family planning, Sahgal suggests, are then bound to

fail in a country where class and caste discriminations remain high, where policies are

a priori founded upon and executed through class filters, and where fundamental

infrastructure and educational awareness for implementing these schemes are terribly

lacking. There will be further coercion from the state as it attempts to prepare the

public for the installation of a ‘free’ market economy. There will also be frustration

for the state as the poor continue to evade or resist such forced activity, such as when

Leila’s maidservant lies to her about the date of her delivery,675 or when the disabled

roadside beggar fights hard with the youth camp members who are attempting to drag

him to a van for sterilisation.676

Sahgal represents the aspects of collaboration of the intelligentsia through a

few set pieces of satire. They are implemented mainly through the classic realist device

of free indirect discourse. As Sonali is invited to dinner at her sister’s house with four

other guests – a professor and his wife, a lawyer, and a newspaper editor – the

Communist professor tells them that he does not like the ‘mother’s son’ (i.e. Sanjay),

but thinks that the emergency is the only solution for poverty. His wife firmly believes

that the constitutional alteration (echoing the 42nd Amendment677) is mandatory since

it will ‘give Madam powers to fight disruptive forces and crush the vested interests’.678

The lawyer and the editor also support the measures. Sonali is angry and thinks of

them as buffoons. As in the opening pages of the novel, analysed above, here too the

dinner guests are not addressed by their names but by social types and titles. This

673 Ibid, pp. 216-17. 674 Ibid, p. 217. 675 Ibid, p. 215. 676 Ibid, p. 80. 677 See Hewitt, p. 135; Chandra pp. 167-69. 678 Sahgal, Rich, p. 85.

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serves to suggest that among the elite, status, rank, and position do count: so ‘the

Professor’ is always ‘professing’; the Editor is always ‘editorialising’ and the Lawyer

is always making sure that everyone knows he is a lawyer. And their respective wives

are basking in the light reflected from their husbands’ status. The narrator enters here

and tells us that ‘The dictatorship around us is one of nature’s marvels, not man-made,

not “made” at all’,679 and then the statement shifts to Sonali’s scepticism about the

situation and to the discourse of dictatorship that ‘the mother-and-son regime’ has

brought the characters to. It again reverts to the narrator, who says that such a

marvellous situation can only happen in newly liberated countries where the ruling

elites are busy mimicking the contemporary ways of life of their colonial masters. This

episode captures in essence how the bourgeoisie was controlled by Gandhi’s

government through both the politics of fear and the manufacturing of consent. These

people as professors, editors or lawyers – producers and circulators of knowledge and

meaning – were deeply complicit in the production of official and representative

‘truths’. In the episode where K. L. is in jail, he meets a student from Jawaharlal Nehru

University who is imprisoned for his past Naxalite links. The student tells him that he

is writing a surrealist play where a dictator, who is half man and half woman, descends

on earth in a chariot amidst fanfare, and throws platitudes to the crowd of learned men

and political heads: ‘I shall banish poverty’, ‘Watch me remove disparity’, and so on.

The crowd cheers with a ‘colossal raucous cackle’.680 This play reminds me of the

episode of the PM’s rally in Mistry’s A Fine Balance which we will see shortly. This

play is an attack on the buffoonish character of the political heads and upper middle

class whose sole job is to support and take order from the high command without any

self-conscience. But Sahgal also introduces an element of ‘play’ in the play’s use of

sycophancy. In the play-script, the laughter of political heads is used ambiguously.

The student describes, ‘And after every few sentences when he/she stops for applause,

there’s this loud hilarious Ha! Ha! Ha!’.681 It is not clear from the use of the word

‘hilarious’, followed by the rhetorical employment of laughter, whether the crowd is

actually cheering the dictator or just laughing at the clichés. This element of self-

reflexive and intertextual use of satire and farce to critique intellectual-bureaucratic

complicity receives a compelling treatment in an another episode when, in response

679 Ibid, p. 82. 680 Ibid, pp. 187-88. 681 Ibid, p. 187.

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to Dev’s comment about the imminent launch and nationalisation of the indigenous

car project, Rose casts the aspersion that it ‘[s]ounds like the emperor’s new clothes

to me. First of all there’s no car, and then you nationalise the one there isn’t. And in

all these years wot you’re saying there isn’t even a model’.682 Rose is aware of the car

project, based on newspaper propaganda and her stepson’s endless talk about it, and

has seen nothing in the last five years since the inception of the project, apart from

numerous deals with foreign investors in her house, like that involving Mr. Neuman

in the beginning of the novel. Unlike Nishi, Rose does not ask Dev about it or bask in

the supposed glory, but casts doubt over the hypothetical project. Particularly

important is her metaphor of ‘emperor’s new clothes’. Apart from reminding us of the

Danish short tale of the invisible clothes promised to an emperor,683 the metaphor

situates the analogy perfectly here: the ‘dictator’ is promised a new car by her son and

close aides, and every measure is taken to amaze the world with the concept of a

‘people’s car’, only that the car is nowhere near completion. The total failure of Sanjay

Gandhi as a professional is unambiguously suggested in the statement ‘there isn’t even

a model.684 We also cannot miss the ironic link with the opening passage where the

narrator speaks of the postcolonial elites’ penchant for expensive cars. These elites,

from their blinkered vision, seems to believe that the car is also what the people want,

which Sahgal calls in another essay ‘imperialism with a new garb’.685 Even if

modernity’s children dream or are made to dream of cars and expensive toys, there is

not, as Vernon Hewitt has noted, enough infrastructure or bureaucratic sincerity in a

postcolonial society ruled by corrupt elites to implement the policies systematically.

In the end, these plans and policies become coercive.

682 Ibid, p. 207. 683 ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ is a Danish short tale by Hans Christian Anderson about two weavers

promising an emperor that they will weave a regal dress that is invisible and suitable for the rank and

stature of the person in question. On a particular day, as the king puts on the cloth and walks the road

in a grand procession, everyone joins in admiration until a child shouts at him saying the emperor is

naked. See, Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, ed. and trans. by Maria

Tatar (London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008), pp. 3-16. 684 Sahgal wrote about the failure of this project and about Sanjay Gandhi’s immature politics and

dictatorial tendencies in her book, Indira Gandhi, pp. 162-65. 685 Sahgal wrote in an essay using the metaphor of the emperor’s clothes that the third-world political

dispensations have unquestionably embraced the neocolonial and imperialist style of politics,

encouraged by the Western world and have turned the countries into social hubs for experiments in

market economy. See Sahgal, Points, pp. 85-86. For a general study, see her lectures, ‘Illusion and

Reality’ (Points, pp. 53-65) and ‘Some Thoughts on the Puzzle of Identity’ (Points, pp. 80-92).

218

Finally, Sahgal uses time and temporality powerfully to redeem the visions

from the bleakness of the present times. The novel uses a longer notion of history

which both attempts to trace the genealogy of the current historical crisis and hints at

an epistemology of crisis, struggle, and achievement. This is produced through the

devices of memory (Rose) and memoir (Sonali). After juggling between Rose’s and

Sonali’s perspectives on the emergency situation in the first two chapters, the third

chapter takes us to Rose’s past, and the subsequent chapters alternate between Sonali’s

and Rose’s views and memories. In one of these past accounts, we encounter Rose’s

crucial memory of her settlement in Lahore and the acts of religious violence in the

early 1940s. As Keshav, Sonali’s father, tells her, this violence is linked with British

imperialism: ‘England hadn’t occupied territories to give English lessons. Empire was

for profit’.686 The British have either instigated religious violence for imperial profit

or caused more violence by suppressing it. Their answer to religious violence was

secularism. But secularism – the principle of the separation of the government

institutions from religious institutions – was conceptually developed and practised in

the European intellectual-economic atmosphere of the enlightenment and

modernisation.687 In the colony, as a number of scholars have argued, the British

imperialists followed a different rule: the rule of terror and profit.688 There was no

significant engagement with the complex and hierarchical religious/social practices.

In a land which has seen thousands of years of Hindu scriptural domination and

hierarchy followed by Mughal and British dominations, a liberal view of secularism

is ineffective and baseless against the rooted practices of religious fundamentalism,

communal violence, and subservient psychology. This historical perspective is

reflected in Sonali’s discovery of her father’s note in a trunk, which records his great

grandfather’s struggle against sati, his mysterious death, and his wife’s decision of

self-immolation to die a ‘pure death’ of sati.689 Her great grandfather, made an orphan,

decided not to follow Hinduism ‘not because of such evils as sati, but the evil is not

explained’.690 This evil, as Hannah Arendt would say, is banal because of the

686 Ibid, p. 143. 687 For a recent reading on this, see Michael Rectenwald, Nineteenth Century British Secularism:

Science, Religion, and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 1-15. 688 For the differing use of law in the metropolitan and colonial context, see Partha Chatterjee, Lineages

in Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),

pp. 1-28 (pp. 5-14); and Stephen Morton, States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 689 Ibid, pp. 124-36. 690 Ibid, p. 136.

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unthinking, normal, law-abiding behaviour which is practised precisely because it is

normal and unexceptional.691 It is widely present on an everyday basis, and follows

unquestionable subservience to the scriptures, heads of state, rulers, leaders, and

monarchs. The situation of the emergency and people’s subservience descend from

this historical genealogy in the banality of evil. They also show how women have been

subjected and tortured by patriarchy for ages. Sonali’s great grandmother immolated

herself because there was no choice for her in a society controlled by men and their

masculine, profit-making values. Two centuries later, the situation has not altered very

much for Sonali and Rose (despite the fact that the great grandmother was from a

colonial rural society and these characters are situated in a postcolonial urban

metropolis). Now the bureaucracy and the government are headed by male figures and

an aggressive masculinity of a female president, and Rose’s house is controlled by a

corrupt male. Sonali and Rose protest against these values and are punished. Sonali is

suspended from her job, and Rose, who discovers the corruption behind the car-

manufacturing project in which her stepson Dev is involved, is murdered. Sahgal’s

gender-based critique here suggests that patriarchy and masculinist values in a society

that is both old and postcolonial will easily win if the ruling elites express no interest

in the country’s redemptive aspects.

One of these aspects, Sahgal tells us through Sonali, is India’s glorious

humanist past and its heritage in cross-cultural artistic production. The novel ends with

Sonali’s meeting with Marcella (Ram’s ex-lover in Lahore) and her husband Brian,

who came to visit their old friends Ram and Rose. Marcella tells Sonali that they are

starting a project on decorative arts from seventeenth-century India, and they want

Sonali, whom they have come to know through their friends, to be their research

assistant. After her initial puzzle, Sonali begins to see the prospects in studying a

longer history of art and cross-cultural relations in India. As she reads an account of

seventeenth-century artistic diaspora and exchanges in a larger Persianite India, she is

fascinated by the richness and warmth of cosmopolitanism in India, and acknowledges

her debt to Rose: ‘though it was Rose’s legacy again, the paths that had crossed hers

now crossing mine, reminding me I was young and alive, with my own century

691 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Viking Press,

1963).

220

stretched out before me, waiting to be lived’.692 Through Rose and through her father’s

diary, the century has already been stretched, and now it is stretched further to

understand the wonderful exchange of love, art, tolerance, and humanism that cultures

and societies have been gifting each other from time immemorial. If the immediate

crisis of the emergency has a genealogy in authoritative rule and religious domination,

there is also a counter-history of cross-cultural exchanges and cosmopolitanism, a

history of ‘great attainments in letters and the arts, with polished manners and a

complicated social life’.693 For one to understand all these, one needs a counter-notion

of time, a time that can stretch far where memories do not disappear without a trace,

a time that says to Rose ‘wait-for-me-I’m-coming, did-you-think-I’d-gone,

convincing her nothing was ever lost, only held in a larger than human history’.694 One

of the earliest critics of Sahgal, Uma Parameswaran, thinks that these historical

passages are weak points of the narrative and unhelpful digressions.695 I, however,

find these passages useful for the broader aim of the narrative: tracing the genealogy

of evil and giving us a redemptive, counter-notion of time and a hope in the future.

Sahgal knows that there may not be an ‘ideal’ form of governance in a postcolonial

society, but there may be an education that recognises the greatness in cross-cultural

exchanges and values, the wonderful history of toleration and co-existence of cultures

in India, and the possibility of a longer history that makes us recognise and love each

other. The digressions and the ending thus are not weak aspects of the narrative, but

integral structural devices for disseminating this philosophy. If the corrupt

bureaucratic world compels a satirical rendering of time, it is also to imagine a

counter-reality where various devices of historical memory are used and which says

as much about the author’s political intentions and social obligations as about the

possibilities that realism holds.

692 Sahgal, Rich, p. 234. 693 Ibid, p. 234; it is useful to mention here that Sahgal dedicates the book ‘To the Indo-British

Experience and what its sharers have learned from each other’. Sahgal, Rich, p. 5. 694 Ibid, p. 104. 695 Parameswaran writes in her review of the book: ‘One notes that the narrative technique of alternating

these two stories, narrated respectively by Sonali herself and by an omniscient narrator, is not

particularly successful because the two voices are too similar. One notes too that a long epistle on suttee

written by Sonali’s grandfather and the vasectomy raids organised by the women's committee in the

new regime are clearly weighty “messages” by which one is expected to be duly impressed but isn't,

because they are so unintegrated into the narrative, hanging on nonexistent pegs […] Rich Like Us is a

fragmented, superficial novel with nothing to hold it together either in content or in technique’, p. 362.

Uma Parameswaran, ‘Review’, World Literature Today, 60.2 (1986), 361-62.

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Critical Realism II, or Realism from Below

Sahgal thus understands the emergency not as a sudden and isolated event, but as one

that is linked both with a longer historical crisis and with the contemporary neo-

imperialist drive where authoritarianism, coercion, class-consent, and market forces

combine to inflict pain on the postcolonial public. She forwards this insightful and

critical reading of the emergency through the conventional realist devices of satire,

irony, and the redemptive notion of a counter-genealogical framework of time, which

make her fiction critical realist in mode, which is filtered through the specificities of

Indian history and culture. At the same time, her use of realism is thoroughly class-

based. This point has been raised suggestively by Pranav Jani and Anita Desai. In an

essay on class and nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Nayantara

Sahgal’s Rich Like Us, Jani argues that the two novels situate the questions of

subaltern politics and voice in the narratives, but hardly allow the subaltern-based

social transformation to take place. The problem, he notes, lies in their preference for

a postnational postcolonialism or in what he calls the ‘namak halal’ nationalism, which

does give voice to the lower class and the subaltern, but only to show how it is

obscured in an elitist worldview.696 Anita Desai writes in a review of Rich Like Us that

the book ‘is rather like flinging a finely embroidered shawl over a naked and mutilated

beggar in the street’.697 The reference to shawl and beggar is strategic here. Sonali is

of affluent Kashmiri Brahmin origin, and the novel sheds considerable light on the

elite Kashmiri lifestyle, commenting on the eating habits, the elaborate wedding

ceremonies, and the fine, embroidered winter clothes that the Kashmiris wear. On the

other hand, the novel also speaks of a disabled beggar (from Rose’s neighbourhood)

who resists sterilisation campaigns and tells Sonali at the end of the novel how his

hands were chopped off as compensation for his claims to the rights to sharecropping.

This narrative of caste atrocity in the villages and class oppression in the cities never

receives sustained attention in Sahgal’s writing. Jani points out that the beggar is only

given a voice after Rose, the spokesperson for the subalterns, is dead.698 Characters

like this beggar continue to remain at the periphery of the bourgeois text, and act as

agents that produce guilt for socially-conscious upper- and middle-class citizens.

696 Pranav Jani, Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English (Ohio: Ohio

University Press, 2010), p. 187. 697 Anita Desai, ‘Living the Emergency’, The Women Review of Books, VI. 10-11 (1989), 11. 698 Jani, Decentring, p. 183.

222

Desai recognises Sahgal’s good intention and courageous attempt to include these

characters, but comments that Sahgal’s polished satiric style is ‘most comfortable in

the drawing rooms and the restaurants that the rich inhabit’.699

Rohinton Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance (1996),700 speaks to this class-based

narration by exclusively focusing on the lower classes and castes and minority

communities during the emergency. Mistry himself is from the minority, but from the

economically influential Parsi community, and is one of the few noted writers to have

written about the problems of marginality and social inclusion of the community and

of the Parsi diaspora. Although his fictions mainly use characters from the Parsi

middle classes, A Fine Balance shifts the focus to the marginalised and the weak

within the minorities. The characters include a Parsi widow, Dina Dalal, a Parsi

student, Maneck Kohla, and a couple of tailors from a distant village and lower-caste

group, the uncle and nephew Ishvar and Omprakash Darji. Through focusing on their

everyday lives, Mistry unfolds gradually how the brutal forces of the emergency affect

and damage the lives of these ‘minor’ characters. I will argue here that Mistry’s

realism is different from Sahgal’s precisely because of the use of this reverse

perspective. Borrowing from Alex Woloch and Toral Gajarawala, I will show how the

features of minorness, caste, and plurality compose his emergency realism. This

realism takes from classic realism, especially in its slow unfolding of contemporary

everyday life and the grand and mysterious historical forces that appear to inflict pain

on citizen-subjects,701 but there are significant differences as well. The historical

forces and factors operating behind the superficial appearance of reality, as we noted

in the Chapter One with insights from Raymond Williams and Georg Lukács, do not

remain unknown, mysterious, or incomprehensible in classic realism. Realism is a

commitment to uncovering and describing these forces. For Mistry, however, the force

and its workings do remain incomprehensible throughout. The realist narrator is also,

unlike Mistry’s narrator here, deeply analytical and participative. Analysis, irony, and

satire are constitutive parts of classic realism as we have seen in Sahgal’s work. At the

same time, this constitution and understanding of realism are thoroughly class- and

699 Desai, ‘Living’, p. 11. 700 Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). 701 In his preface to the novel, Mistry includes a quote on the relation between fiction and reality in

realism from Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. The nineteenth-century European realist element in

Mistry’s novel has been a point of debate.

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caste-based (liberal bourgeois). This may be the reason this analytical purchase is

relatively muted in Mistry: his fiction is about the lower castes and characters from

vulnerable communities who have to work hard to survive. They do talk about the

emergency but not in the way that Sahgal’s characters do, or for that matter, the way

Devi’s politically-educated Bashai talks about the minimum wage. The emergency

appears here through its coercive effects, such as a gigantic rally for the Prime Minister

where the tailors are compelled to go, the sudden changes in law that disable their

bodies and make it difficult for them to find or keep work, and determine their fate,

etc. My contention is that Mistry attempts to give voice to a segment of society which

went through the most atrocious instances of violence during the emergency but whose

voice was never heard seriously in ‘major’ literature or in Indian English literature.702

I begin with an episode from a chapter titled ‘Return of Solitude’ in the later

part of the novel, when Ishvar and Om are about to go to their village to find a bride

for Om. They now live with Dina in her rented house as paying guests, after their

shanty house was destroyed in the government’s beautification plans, and after they

were ‘mistakenly’ taken to a rehabilitation camp as beggars. Dina clears some space

in the store room for Om and his wife, and finds the quilt she has been making from

the leftovers of clothes from Mrs Gupta’s garment orders. Om looks at the quilt and

says the poplin reminds him of his first day at work. Dina and Maneck also remember

some past experiences from the patches of clothes. Ishvar then joins them, saying that

the cambric square reminds him of the sad incident of the destruction of their house.

When Dina urges that she will cut that portion out, Ishvar replies:

702 See his interview with Robert Mc Lay, where he says, ‘After writing my first two books, I became

aware that they were stories about a very particular and very special kind of city, and even then I had

focused only on a very small part – the Parsi Community – and I made a conscious decision in this book

to include more than this, mainly because, in India, seventy-five per cent of Indians live in villages and

I wanted to embrace more of the social reality of India. And so I made the tailors come from a small

village and Maneck come from a hill station in the North. So while this city is certainly important, I

wanted to give a strong sense of the different locales and I wanted to root the reader in those places so

that he has a very clear sense of where these people are coming from and what their difficulties are

now’, qtd in Nandini Bhautoo-Dewnarain, Rohinton Mistry: An Introduction (New Delhi: Foundation

Books, 2007), p. 30.

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‘No no, Dinabai, let it be, it looks very nice in there.’ His fingers stroked the

cambric texture, recapturing the time. ‘Calling one piece sad is meaningless.

See, it is connected to a happy piece – sleeping on the verandah. And the next

square – chapatis. Then the violet tusser, when we made masala wada and

started cooking together. And don’t forget this georgette patch, where

Beggarmaster saved us from the landlord’s goondas.’

He stepped back, pleased with himself, as though he had elucidated an intricate

theorem. ‘So that’s the rule to remember, the whole quilt is much more

important than any single square’.703

The first thing that strikes us here is the idea of plurality. This quilt is constituted of

leftover patches of different times and experiences and represents a tightly-knit

multiplicity. Leftover clothes are surplus and useless material, but when they are

stitched together, they can form a beautiful and diverse body. At the same time, the

quilt also has a specific utilitarian aspect: it provides relief from the harshness of

winter. There are then a number of symbolic suggestions here. The leftover clothes

stand for the socio-economically minor characters in the novel. They are a surplus

army of labour, invisible and invisibilised. But together they are a functioning family,

not useless and leftovers, and form a community and live by it. The quilt, made

exclusively from the experiences of minority communities, suggests that this plurality

is an accumulated composite experience of India’s vast lower-class, lower-caste, and

minority population. Minor has paradoxically an expansive meaning here, for being

the majority of India. Minority is not an unqualified blob among the masses, but is

embedded with complex class, caste, and gender relations. Dina and Maneck are

Parsis, and are not socially from the same caste and class as Ishvar and Om are. Dina

is from a middle-class Parsi community; she has chosen to live independently after

her husband’s death. Maneck comes from a relatively stable background

economically, but is from the mountainous regions of northern India, which are in

peripheral relation to the city (although the city is not named, it is in many ways similar

to Bombay). This peripheral and minor social status continues to haunt him during his

stay at the college hostel in the city, especially during the political agitations about the

hike in hostel meal prices. He feels he does not belong there and wants to go home.

Because of this minority, he finds it easy to make friends with Om and Ishvar who are

703 Mistry, Balance, p. 490.

225

also minor but through their caste status. Dina is also in a peripheral relationship to

the city, first as a Parsi and then as a widow. Mistry brings all these socially,

economically, and religiously minor characters into the core of the city to show how

their different peripheral conditions give birth to a wonderfully fabricated minor life.

But in order to do that, he has to also show the composite nature of this life. This is

indicated in Dina’s rejection of Maneck’s request that he spend a day with the tailors.

She categorically says, ‘You don’t understand the problems. I have nothing against

them, but they are tailors – my employees. A distance has to be maintained. You are

the son of Farokh and Aban Kohla. There is a difference, and you cannot pretend there

isn’t – their community, their background’.704 This statement is important because it

begins with the notion of class difference through a professional hierarchy – the tailors

are Dina’s employees. Dina feels empowered now because for the last ten years she

has been working day and night as a seamstress to survive and raise money for the

bills, which has cost her her eyesight. The emergency finally brings happy times for

her, allowing her to employ tailors and monitor their work. But she has to be strong,

clever, and if needed, rude, so that the tailors are prevented from learning things that

might lead them to challenge her authority: knowledge of the main order supplier and

also of her vulnerability, insecurity, and poor eyesight. But this new job as a middle-

woman of order and supply of clothes has not necessarily improved her economic

conditions. This is pointed out in the brief description of her house by Maneck, who

is her paying guest: ‘Everywhere there was evidence of her struggle to stay ahead of

squalor, to mitigate with neatness and order the shabbiness of poverty. He saw it on

the chicken wire on the broken windowpanes, in the blackened kitchen wall and the

ceiling, in the flaking plaster, in the repairs on her blouse collar and sleeves’.705 There

are worms in the bathroom and Dina tells him that he has to live with them as she

cannot spend money on the costly antiseptic phenol every day. Here is a picture of

harsh conditions and a desperate effort at making life look neat and ordered – features

that so essentially characterise the lower and lower-middle classes in Indian cities. The

emphasis on cleanliness and neatness helps us to understand the latter half of Dina’s

statement to Maneck: the tailors are different in community and in background. Dina

justifies this difference by saying, ‘what about health and hygiene? How do they

704 Ibid, p. 293. 705 Ibid, p. 200.

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prepare their food? Can they afford proper cooking oil? Or do they buy cheap

adulterated Vanaspati, like most poor people? […] And what about water? […] [I]s

there a clean supply in their neighbourhood, or is it contaminated?’706 There is a clear

conjunction made between class and caste. Dina knows that the tailors are from a

chamar caste, whose job is to skin dead animals; hence they are unclean and

untouchable. Decades have passed since untouchability was abolished at

independence, but there is still no sign of social freedom from the strictures and

prejudices of caste. As we noted in the previous chapters, through the examples of

Hatui people in Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne and the choktars in Nabarun

Bhattacharya’s Kāngāl Mālshāt, the equation of low caste with unclean living, a

product of Hindu caste hierarchy, has hardly disappeared from rural society.

Interestingly, Dina is an urbanite Parsi, not Hindu. Parsis are themselves a socio-

religious minority but have a respected history in the growth of Indian economy and

nationalist politics. They are minorities to both Muslims, with whom they share an

even more complex geo-religious and historical relation, and to Hindus in (a largely

Hindu-based) India.707 Dina’s statement suggests that in the process of assimilating

into a nationalist (Hindu) India and because of their urbanite location and class

prestige, Parsis have in a sense Hinduised themselves, and absorbed all the intricacies

of caste prejudices, cleanliness being one of them. Ironically, her saying Maneck has

to live with the worms only shows how baseless and artificial the relation between

caste, class, and cleanliness is. The point of gender is also important here. Mistry

chooses to foreground Dina’s tremendous sense of strength and endurance. In her

decision to live independently and not to take help from her brother, Dina is taken to

represent India’s early postcolonial journey in self-determination; Dina’s declining

eyesight may be interpreted as a metaphor for the troubles and disillusionments of an

urban and hardworking India suffering from unemployment and inflation, while her

new exploitation of labour may stand for the country’s subsequent forced entry into

neo-colonial economy. But such a reading refuses to acknowledge her subjective,

resistant, and combative qualities. Dina derives an immense sense of pride, followed

by a new feeling of empowerment, from her self-reliance during the days of harsh

706 Ibid, pp. 294-95. 707 For a historical reading on this, see, Parsis in India and the Diaspora, ed. by John Hinnels and Alan

Williams (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 79-135; for the contemporary context, Jesse L. Palsetia,

The Parsis of India: Preservation of Identity in Bombay City (Leiden: Brill, 2001), especially pp. 320-

37.

227

struggles for survival. While good-intentioned, she is both a tiny worker in a long

chain of capitalist mode of production, and an exploiter of cheap labour. As Peter

Morey comments: ‘all characters and relationships are affected by the machinations

of the capitalist economy: from the piece-working tailors and their well-intentioned

employer Dina, who is nonetheless implicated as an exploiter of cheap, non-unionised

labour.708 Dina thus plays a complex game of gender and class with the tailors. She

has to be strong and sympathetic, but is at times manipulative when she realises that

Ishvar is soft-hearted and obedient. Om on the other hand is impatient with her, having

noticed her social prejudices in not allowing them to sit on the sofa or eat with her,

and in requiring them to clean their tea cups themselves. While Ishvar does not

complain and takes it to be a conventional caste practice, the young Om is conscious

and angry. He is often rude to Dina. Since Maneck does not maintain any class division

and mingles with them easily, and Dina also becomes sympathetic to them later, Om’s

rudeness gradually dissipates. The point is that they are together because they need

one another. The globalised capitalist mode of production has given birth to an

international (gendered) division of labour, a long chain of command, order, and

supply. They know that they are all vulnerable and peripheral in their own ways. They

can profit from this system only if they work together and stay within the order of

hierarchy. That does not mean that the social and class prejudices disappear, but that

they stand a higher chance with happy co-habitation and adaptive behaviour than with

antagonism. The quilt in its various leftover patches suggests such a plurality. Every

patch is different but together they interact and make a beautiful whole. All the

characters here are different in their respective social, economic, and religious aspects,

but through work and necessity they have come to live together and accommodate

each other, forming a happy, composite, socially-functioning community and, like the

quilt, relieving each other with comfort from the otherwise harsh struggles for

survival.

Both this composite minor plurality and the course of life of these characters

are conditioned by the emergency. The emergency benefits them initially and then

takes away too much. Since the characters are minor from a socio-economic point of

view, quotidian in their daily life, and busy in survival struggles, the emergency

708 Peter Morey, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2000), pp. 181-82.

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appears as an incomprehensible and mysterious force to them; the characters do not

understand what the emergency is. When the tailors ask about it, Dina, who has come

to know from Mrs Gupta that the emergency is a boon for business, tells them

optimistically: ‘Government problems – games played by people in power. It doesn’t

affect ordinary people like us’.709 This appears to be a deeply ironic statement for the

characters. Dina’s judgement that these are games played by people in power is astute.

These people are never in the novel’s focus because it is a novel for the minorities

who are hardly in contact with these extraordinary politicians and people in everyday

life. But the games these politicians play are so broad-based, powerful, and repressive,

that they creep into every part of society and affect the ‘ordinary people’ like Dina.

This perspective of the emergency as an abstract, sudden, and mysterious force is

constituted primarily through the incidents of slum destruction and sterilisation.

Mistry anticipates the immensity of the force through the event of forcible packing of

slum people at a Prime Minister’s rally. The narration here makes clear the sudden

and mysterious nature of the force: ‘The early morning gathering of the red double-

deckers outside the slum was noticed first by a child from the drunk’s family. The

little girl came running in to tell her mother’.710 Nobody knows what the double-

deckers are for. In fact, the drivers when asked tell them that they are waiting for the

assignments. Ishvar and Om believe that there may be a bus stop at their slum and

consider the emergency to be seriously beneficial for the poor. Nobody is interested

in the rally, but they are compelled by the police to attend it. On the other occasion

when the bulldozers arrive to demolish the colony for beautification plans, Mistry’s

narration again captures the suddenness of the event: ‘Ishvar was first to notice that

the smoke from the cooking fires did not linger over the hutment colony. He tripped

on the crumbling pavement, his eyes searching the horizon. At this hour the haze

should have been clouding thick. “Everyone fasting or what?”’711 Note that Mistry

uses the word ‘notice’ on both occasions, once in passive voice and the other in active.

‘Notice’ stands for a new awareness of something and a subsequent close inspection.

The slum dwellers talk among themselves about the arrival of these buses and

machines, and even ask the drivers even though no one knows anything initially. Then

suddenly comes the order to the police and the political party members: either to carry

709 Mistry, Balance, p. 75. 710 Ibid, p. 257. 711 Ibid, p. 294.

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people to the rally or to destroy their houses. In these acts and in the manner of

narration, Mistry clearly suggests the immensely tyrannical nature of the emergency.

It is an abstract force whose nature appears concrete through the objects of buses,

machines, policemen, politicians, and so on. Nobody, not even the educated, knows

what it actually is, as laws and government policies during the emergency change so

suddenly.

There is a repeated realisation in the novel that the emergency laws have no

particular meaning. People are randomly taken to custody, detained without trial, and

killed. Nawaz, in whose house Ishvar and Om stayed initially, is taken to jail because

he has embarrassed his customer, a ‘well-connected’ person, in front of his colleagues

by asking for his long-overdue money, which this customer refused to pay because the

assignment clothes ‘fit badly’.712 Nawaz’s neighbour tells Ishvar about the MISA and

that, ‘With the emergency, everything is upside down. Black can be made white, day

turned into night. With the right influence and a little cash, sending people to jail is

very easy’.713 On another occasion, Ibrahim, the stooge for Dina’s landlord, threatens

Dina to vacate the flat because the flat-owner wants to turn it into a fashionable and

expensive apartment. When Dina speaks of the court of law, Ibrahim responds,

‘Nobody knows the law during the emergency’, for laws may change anytime, and

according to the benefits of the capital owner or the Prime Minister who is the

lawmaker herself.714 When Dina comes to court to find a suitable lawyer to file a case

of tenancy, she meets Valmik, who, not very optimistic about her situation, says ‘the

Prime Minister cheats in the election, and the relevant law is promptly modified. Ergo,

she is not guilty. We poor mortals have to accept that bygone events are beyond our

clutch, while the Prime Minister performs juggling acts with time past.’715 There is a

clear indication here of the suddenness and abstractness of the emergency that cannot

be comprehended by the weak and the vulnerable. The abstract nature of a historical

force, and the concretisation of such abstraction through repressive acts and

machineries, are discussed in Eli Park Sorensen’s Lukácsian reading of realism of the

novel. Sorensen writes,

712 Mistry, Balance, p. 299. 713 Ibid, p. 299. 714 Ibid, p. 432. 715 Ibid, p. 563; emphasis in original.

230

The concrete meaning of the historical force that acts on the characters’ lives,

on the surface, is separate from any concrete doings at the quotidian level.

However, its effects are present in most of the events narrated as mediated

through an ironic or contradictory series of transformative and transforming

parts, joints, and sequences. At the quotidian level, it is difficult, if not

impossible, to trace these effects back to their original cause, except in an

abstract sense.716

For Sorensen, these parts, joints, and series are meaningfully bound by the ironic

transformative aspect serving as the ‘leap or an abstraction’717 in the novel.

Randomness and arbitrariness are not something that Mistry specifically brings to this

novel, but they are parts of what Lukács called the compositional structure of the

realist novel. Agreed; there is however something else to this reading: first,

randomness is also structural in nature, used by the postcolonial state to discipline the

postcolonial public; and second, Mistry provides a balancing aspect as well through a

minor-oriented humorous-sympathetic form of narration.

The structural violence inflicted by the postcolonial state, an example of which

being the destruction of slums for the beautification of the city, not only testifies to

the enormous and sudden nature of power of the postcolonial state, but also reveals

the precarity of the urban poor. For politicians, the urban poor are merely vote-banks

and can be dispensed with at will. But the urge to live and fight for survival by the

urban poor is as strong as is the fact that the population of the urban poor is integral

to the political metropolitan societies – recall that Rushdie in Midnight’s Children

writes that the slum is reportedly seen to supernaturally exist here and there after its

demolition,718 or that Nabarun Bhattacharya deploys a narrative of irreal guerrilla

warfare to allegorise the hawkers’ agitations against the state. Mistry here underscores

both state violence and minor resistance through Ishvar and Om’s encounter with

family planning and their tremendous desire to live and resume the practices of the

dismantled community. Their family was burnt alive by the upper-caste people

because Narayan, Om’s father, equipped with efficient tailoring skills and political

consciousness, stood against the caste-based violence of the local landlord Thakur.

716 Eli Park Sorensen, ‘Excess and Design in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance’, Novel: A Forum for

Fiction, 41.2-3 (2008), 342-362 (p. 350). 717 Ibid, p. 358. 718 Rushdie, Children, p. 569.

231

Ishvar and Om were saved because they were in town working as tailors. Thakur, later

a Congress Party leader, recalls them in the village and arranges for their forcible

sterilisation, for while he cannot kill them in broad daylight, he has the legal

framework to disable and maim them. A stranger tells Ishvar and Om that he has been

sterilised twice, showing that there is no count, only target-fulfilment.719 After they

were made disabled, with Om’s testicles forced out and Ishvar’s leg left to rot from a

careless sterilisation operation, Ishvar cries out, ‘what has this country come to?

Treating man as animals. People can’t visit their natives?’720 This blurring of the

distinction between man and animal is, according to Giorgio Agamben, ‘a dominant

paradigm of government in contemporary politics’.721 The modern state, which

inherits from the colonial state of violence, suspends rule for exception and turns

exception into the rule, reducing human life into ‘homo sacer’ or bare life that can be

killed without impunity.722 Stephen Morton uses Agamben’s theory of ‘state of

exception’ to posit that ‘contemporary states of emergency owe much to colonial

forms of sovereignty’ which were in turn based on the discourse of ‘lawful violence’

in European colonies.723 His studies in colonial law and governmentality in India,

Kenya, South Africa, and Palestine shows how practices of state violence on citizen

subjects operated as part of the discourse of colonial governmentality, the preservation

of law, and the liquidation of anti-colonial struggles. The declaration of state of

emergency is thus both a harking back to the history and culture of state-sponsored

law-preserving colonial violence, and a dominant form of modern politics in which

the government can lawfully blur the distinction between the human and the

nonhuman, and can turn characters in the novel such as Om and Ishvar into disabled

bodies or kill the already expendable ones such as Shankar the beggar without

impunity. The force that appears random and incomprehensible to these everyday

characters is in fact a structural form of violence that is historical in nature and integral

to the ethics and practices of the postcolonial state.

Mistry’s narration does the ‘fine balancing’ act here which I will argue

constitutes his minor realist aesthetic of the emergency. It is clear that the minor

719 Mistry, Balance, p. 535. 720 Ibid, p. 546. 721 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 2. 722 Ibid, p. 18. 723 Stephen Morton, States of Emergency, p. 3.

232

characters are powerless. But Mistry does not narrate the incidents with drama and

sentiment, as Bhabani Bhattacharya does in Hungers!, or as Hardy does through a

tragic-fatalistic style of narration in The Return of the Native (whose depiction of

Egdon Heath as a powerful and controlling force is close to that of the emergency).724

His narration is rather light-hearted and humorous. By light-hearted I do not mean

unengaging or superficial, nor do I suggest by humorous the quality of being

judgmental, condescending, and partisan. Rather, these qualities stand for the

narrator’s deep sense of sympathy and solidarity with the characters. Tragic events

continue to happen in the lives of the weak and the vulnerable, but what characterises

India’s vast minor population is their capacity to endure obstacles and continue to live

through togetherness, humour, and solidarity Mistry’s narrator is both participative

(sympathetic) and observant (affective-expressive) in these occasions. The episode of

the PM’s rally can serve the point. The rally is described sometimes from the

consciousness of Ishvar, Om, and Rajaram, and sometimes from that of the narrator.

The big wooden figure of Indira Gandhi at the rally is described thus: ‘The cardboard-

and-plywood figure stood with arms outstretched, waiting as though to embrace the

audience. An outline map of the country hung suspended behind the head, a battered

halo’.725 This line could have been the thought of the narrator’s, Om’s or Rajaram’s.

It could have been Om’s because right before this description Om exclaims: ‘Look at

that [the figure] yaar!’ But it could equally have been Rajaram’s, for when the figure

falls due to the downwash of the rose-petal-showering helicopter, Rajaram says,

‘nobody wants to be caught in the Prime Minister’s embrace’. Mistry here suggests a

plural narratorial consciousness that is critical and sarcastic. The cut-out figure is

created to indicate the image of Mother India (note the map outline behind the figure,

and also the repeated references to Indira Gandhi as Mother India in the speech of the

dignitaries). However, contrary to the conventional image of Mother India, where a

Goddess is holding an Indian flag in one hand and blessing the viewer with the other

in front of a life-size outline of India, Gandhi’s figure here is ridiculously larger while

the outline of India merely appears as a ‘battered halo’. The sarcasm is clear that Indira

is a more powerful figure than India as a nation. There is a Rabelaisian sense of

grotesque here, in which the monstrous body of a woman is treading the ground and

724 See Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978 [orig. pub: 1878]). 725 Ibid, p. 262.

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battering it, killing everyone in her embrace. Rajaram’s mockery that everyone is

escaping her embrace despite the exuberant exhibition of love and affection has to be

read in this context. His sarcasm is again on display when he tells the tailors that the

packed rally is the ‘government’s tamasha’.726 Tamasha, or theatrics in Hindi, is an

old form of theatrical performance in India combining miming, body painting, dance,

innovative use of on-stage light, and of magic to tell a heartrending story and capture

the attention of the audience. The melodramatic aspect is integral to Indian culture and

society. Here, Tamasha is highlighted through a number of theatrics during the rally:

the sudden flashing of coloured lights on stage, the showering of rose petals from the

helicopter, Gandhi’s son Sanjay Gandhi distributing leaflets from a gas balloon, and

so on. Mistry shows here how politicians use theatrics to capture the attention of a

large audience ranging anywhere between ten thousand and five hundred thousand

(here twenty-five thousand) people, who cannot see the ministers clearly and are busy

in themselves. Nonetheless, this tamasha tactic backfires, for as the dignitaries begin

their hackneyed political speeches, ‘Rajaram took out a coin and began playing Heads

or Tails with Om. Around them, people were making new friends, chatting, discussing

the monsoon. Children invented games and drew pictures in the dust’.727 Later, when

the Prime Minister herself takes the stage and starts talking about the ‘disruptive

forces’ against the government, saying that the government ‘will continue to fight back

until there is no more danger to democracy’,728 Ishvar and Om along with others start

playing a game of cards. These actions suggest that these speeches do not make any

sense, and that people have begun to see through the hypocrisy of the politicians, who

speak about eliminating poverty but arrive at the rally by helicopter, about discipline

in work but force people to stop working and starve for the day to attend a rally. The

notion of collectivised Nehruvian nation-building is mocked in such apparent

tiredness and indifference to these speeches. The hilarity is further heightened when

Gandhi’s speech about eliminating poverty is juxtaposed with Rajaram’s response to

Om’s smart card playing: ‘“Is that all?” […] “So much noise for that? Only a small

obstacle! Beat this if you have the strength!”’729 The sense of anti-climax in Rajaram’s

response may as well be transposed onto the ‘serious’ act of poverty elimination,

726 Mistry, Balance, p. 259. 727 Ibid, p. 263. 728 Ibid, p. 265. 729 Ibid, p. 265.

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relegating it to nonsense noise-making. On the other hand, card playing is a pun here,

suggesting that Gandhi herself is playing the cards, in the superstitious sense that she

consults her astrologer who picks the day of the rally despite its intense heat (this is

pointed out by a volunteer; Rushdie also speaks about her superstition in Midnight’s

Children).730 Humour and irony here give weight to the sarcastic and suggestive nature

of the narration. Sarcasm through simple humour is used consummately in the

theatrics of showering rose petals through the helicopter: ‘The crowd cheered, but the

pilot had mistimed it. Instead of showering the Prime Minister and dignitaries, the

petals fell in a pasture behind the stage. A goatherd who was grazing the animals

thanked the heavens for the honour, and hurried home to tell his family about the

miracle’.731 This is of course neither Rajaram’s nor the two tailors’ sarcastic

consciousness; it is the omniscient narrator who uses a simple form of humour to

suggest the futility of these acts and the politics of exhibitionism/theatrics, both of

which have come to define Gandhi and her emergency regime.

These acts are futile because there really is no clear plan for eradicating

poverty or developing the economy, only policies, programmes, speeches, and

gimmicks. Indeed, the baselessness of Gandhi’s speech of helping the poor is cogently

hinted at the end of the rally episode when the slum dwellers are refused their promised

money for attendance and dropped off the bus midway through the roads. The minor

population are mere numbers for votes, expendable figures; they receive no respect,

are not considered humans, and can be disposed of at any time. Mistry’s narration

shifts from sarcasm and humour to sympathy and fellow-feeling. As they come back

to the slum, they hear a strange noise from the house of their friend, Monkey-man.

Earlier, Monkey-man had requested the police officer to allow him to take his

monkeys to the rally, because unlike his dog they could not stay alone.732 His wish

was not granted because it was claimed that the event was not a circus, which is

entirely ironic because the rally was indeed a circus show in itself filled with theatrics,

gimmick, light, drama, athleticism, etc. But this is a circus by and for humans, not for

nonhuman animals. The Monkey-man then discovers that his dog has killed and eaten

parts of the monkeys out of hunger. He tries to throttle the dog but is taken away by

730 Ibid, p. 262. 731 Mistry, Balance, p. 264. 732 Ibid, p. 260.

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the tailors and Rajaram. Mistry’s narrator pinpoints a tremendous sense of affection

and love between humans and animals as well as between slum dwellers. They do not

mock the Monkey-man because they understand his deep love and emotion for these

animals, and instead stay close to him ‘past midnight, letting him grieve for as long as

he liked’.733 Despite knowing that Dina will be angry for their absence and that they

should prepare to leave early tomorrow, both tailors choose to help him mourn the loss

and convince him to forgive the dog’s deeds out of hunger. What are seen as

expendable bodies in the slum for the state become a community where people take

care of each other to provide relief and warmth, even as they also have to struggle

every day for survival and compete with each other in jobs. The tailors say that the

incident is no one’s fault, but of course it is the fault of the emergency, of its agents

who not only seizes the livelihood of a poor man but also his family. Here the narration

aims subdued irony and sarcasm at the state and the emergency, but conveys a sense

of sympathy and fellow-feeling for the minor characters of the novel.

I have been using the term minor in a socio-economic sense, as well as in a

way these characters would otherwise be considered peripheral and minor in a

bourgeois critical realist novel (recall the beggar in Sahgal’s novel). I have argued that

Mistry adopts a minor aesthetic of plurality to shape his emergency realism. Yet, I

think a crucial observation needs to be made on the use of the term here. Minor

characters, as Alex Woloch tells us, have always been an integral part of realist

writing. They are used in the two categories of worker and eccentric to play the

instrumental, utilitarian role of supporting the mainframe of the narrative – following

the protagonist and then disappearing quickly.734 In a time of huge socio-economic

transformation in Europe for capitalist industrialism, they appeared as ‘the

proletarians of the novel; and the realist novel – with its intense class consciousness

and attention towards social inequality – makes much use of such formal processes’.735

In the twentieth century, the two World Wars, the Great Depression, decolonisation,

the rise of Communist politics, social movements based on gender, race, class etc.,

increasingly changed the publishing conditions and social position of writers, and

consequently the notion of heroes and protagonists in the European novel. This not

733 Ibid, p. 269. 734 Alex Woloch, The One vs The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the

Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 23-27. 735 Ibid, p. 27; emphasis in original.

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only brought into focus the lives of minor characters in autobiographical or fictional

frameworks, but in the process also constitutively reshaped the modes of realism.

Socialist realism, for instance, which encourages writing by proletarians about

proletarians, is clearly a politically shaped mode within the register of realism. In

Indian realist writing, minor characters, which mostly belong to the lower castes and

classes, received focal attention during the late-colonial caste-based movements and

the literary movement of the Progressive Writers’ Association. But the characters were

still either seen in a class-based sentimental framework or rationalised in a lens shaped

by the values of modernisation (one can think here of the writings of Saratchandra

Chattopadhyay and Mulk Raj Anand). Literature that writes the lives of minor

characters began to take shape, properly speaking, with the Dalit writings. According

to Toral Gajarawala, Dalit realist writing borrows from the political emergency and

proletarian ethic of Russian socialist realism (which, perhaps, is not surprising): the

idea of breaking the social and economic shackles and emerging as a free social entity.

But unlike the concept of a hero within socialist realism, the Dalit writers situated a

collectivised politics or a revolutionary consciousness in their writing. The Dalits in

these novels are not as minor: ‘in a genre whose stated aim is the evocation of the

human conditions of Dalit materiality and the prescription for its transgression, the

character who provides the key can never be considered minor’.736 The Dalit character

in Gajarawala’s reading appears as a composite protagonist who is not a modernist

fragmented self, but a plural body constructed through several narrative selves, what

Gajarawala terms the ‘realist particularism’ of the Dalit novel.737 I think Mistry also

does this here – making a tapestry of a collectivised composite plural being of minor

characters. But there is a crucial difference here as well. Mistry is from a socio-

economically privileged background. He settled in Canada in the early 1980s. He

decided to write about minority characters because his research found hardly any noted

fictional representation of the class- and caste-based tortures and trauma that the

minority communities had to go through during the emergency.738 Also, he writes in

English – a language that is a token of global cultural power.739 He is not unaware of

736 Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions, p. 92. 737 Ibid, pp. 92-93. 738 Nandini Bhautoo-Dewnarain, Rohinton Mistry, p. 30. 739 In such a framework, his writing appears close to the category of ‘minor literature’ of Franz Kafka’s

as the French philosophers, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would have it. In Kafka: Towards a Minor

Literature (trans. by Dana Polan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986]), they wrote: ‘A

minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within

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his socio-cultural privileges, nor does he attempt to write an authentic portrayal of

caste atrocity and class violence. From this awareness of difference, he creates a

narrative matrix where the narrator is an outsider but deeply sympathetic. The strategic

use of sarcasm and humour, and the adoption of multiple minor consciousness, allow

him to give an aesthetics of minority in the novel. I will add to this discussion two

other features of the narration – detailed character-building and coeval use of time –

and conclude the section.

Mistry’s narrator takes time to develop the background of the characters. The

novel begins historically, on the day the actual emergency was declared, as Ishvar,

Om, and Maneck also arrive at Dina’s house. This is followed by Dina’s life story.

The past then comes back to the present in the tailors’ search for a rented house, where

Om appears to be always impatient and angry. Soon we are told how Om’s parents

and his whole family were burnt alive, and we begin to understand the depth of anger

behind the impatience. After this, Maneck’s story is introduced. Each of these

characters is constructed as historical and important. They may be social-economically

minor but they all have important life stories to tell. Against the dynamism of these

characters, the so-called important figures of political heads and upper-class, upper-

caste people appear as flat types, even as buffoons at times (as we saw in the episode

of the PM’s rally). Through these acts, Mistry makes it clear from the beginning of the

narrative that he is writing a novel and these characters are his heroes. We need to

know who they are and why they are here together. What is suggested in this kind of

narration is that the linearity of time is composed of many linear historical events: If

what the novel wants to show us is the intercepted and interlinked lives of multiple

characters, this interlinking must be historical in nature, since each character exists in

an instance that is an accumulation of all the moments in the past. The narration hence

follows a concept of time where linearity and horizontality of time are bound together.

There are only sixteen chapters in this six-hundred-and-fourteen-page novel, because

every chapter is composed of four to five episodes that tell us what the characters are

a major language (p. 16). Kafka was born in Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a Jewish

minority family who spoke Yiddish. He was educated in German and used that language for writing

allegorically about racial, social and legal issues. Deleuze and Guattari think that Kafka’s literary

techniques, often a subtle mixing of realism with fantasy, derive from his ‘deterritorialisation’, his

ethnic and socio-political minoritisation, recalling Mistry’s socio-political and historical belonging. But

unlike Kafka, neither does Mistry use a language of social mobility (English being a minority language

in reading fiction, at least in the late nineties when the novel was published); nor does he write like

Kafka, altering radically the codes of realism through innovative prose and formal use.

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doing at a particular time. Sometimes, an episode tells us what Om and Ishvar are

doing in their slum (e.g. in Chapter III, entitled ‘Small Obstacles’, they are shown to

be making new friends with Rajaram and Monkey-man in their new slum-

neighbourhood in which the narration includes brief background descriptions of these

friends, etc.740 Sometimes, it talks about Dina, her problems regarding the house rent,

and the recent pressure of eviction from Ibrahim and others (as in Chapter XI, ‘The

Bright Future Clouded’741). These characters are never just given a brief note; they are

actually important for the content of the narrative, helping Mistry to compose the

novel’s vision of a pluralistic social fabric.742 For sure, the events progress in time, but

time in a plural society is also pluralistic. Here, one tragic event in one’s life bodes

tragedy for all, as their lives are economically and socially connected; nonetheless,

they still fight together in their different ways to recover a happy time. This dimension

of time can only be seen from a future perspective when the current time has become

past, and when the longer framework makes life a pattern of sadness and happiness

rather than a one-sided representation. The plural notions of time are etched onto the

linear narrative, like how the different social times are etched onto the quilt. Here,

once again, the quilt episode becomes important for our discussion. In the first quote

about the quilt patches, the characters were trying to find out the experiences that these

patches remind them of. Like those experiences, the patches are leftovers as well. But

the vast minor population in India does not throw away leftovers. They keep them, for

they may be of use in the future. Similarly, the philosophy of time is one of keeping

the past with the present. This is most clearly understood in the old cultural act of

drawing events (patterns) on a shawl or on a quilt. Through the act of drawing, people

acknowledge how the past makes the present vibrant through the co-existence of sad

and happy elements – which is exactly what Ishvar, the villager, says in the quilt quote.

The point is not to concentrate on one patch or element but on the whole quilt.

Together the quilt is the dynamic being of time. But Ishvar also qualifies later in the

episode that ‘time has no length and breadth. The question is what happened during

its passing. And what happened is, our lives have been joined together’.743 The

sentence proves to be ironic later, because after this episode the tailors go through the

740 Mistry, Balance, pp. 167-86. 741 Ibid, pp. 428-33. 742 For instance, through Shankar they come to know the Beggarmaster, who will go on to rescue them

from the rehabilitation camp and later from the landlord’s goons. 743 Mistry, Balance, p. 491.

239

horrors of sterilisation, even though this will not kill them or separate them from one

another for life. The novel does not end with absolute tragedy either. We are shown

that despite all these problems, despite the immense level of torture and pain

conditioned by Gandhi’s emergency, these characters have continued to live and add

more patches to the quilt, which makes a final appearance at the end. Here, a few

threads have come off the quilt, symbolic of the disabled condition of the characters’

bodies and profession, but Ishvar the beggar says he can fix the quilt, meaning that

they are not psychologically defeated. Mistry shows us that there is still equal

excitement for their old profession and equal affection for each other. Maneck, who

deserted this community, dies of guilt, but those who withstood the horrors have

continued to be together and make a community which is disabled but not

dysfunctional. In this way, Mistry’s narrative act of giving voice to a plural minor

population becomes empowering for his readers.

Thus, I disagree with Nilufer Bharucha, who thinks that Mistry has failed in

depicting caste violence authentically because of his geographical distance from the

local realities of India and has turned the characters of Om and Ishvar into ‘cardboard

boxes’.744 Mistry has not tried to write an authentic narrative of caste violence here.

Rather, he dares to give voice to the characters whom Emma Tarlo considered the

subalterns and found not resistant and combative enough. He takes time to build the

community of minor population and to make them feel important. We saw these

characters in Rushdie and in Sahgal, but never found them as serious, active, dynamic

beings and agents as they are here. Mistry creates a narrative technique that draws

from the minor lives of these characters and never hides the semblance of a participant-

narrator. Yet, this is not an anthropological participant-narrator, but one who has deep

sympathy for these people, a deep knowledge of the lives of India’s minor population,

and above all, a balancing sense of judgement between tragic events and the hope to

live and love the other. For this reason, I believe that reading this novel as postcolonial

realism only offers us a limited understanding. Eli Park Sorensen’s Lukácsian reading

is astute, as is that of Laura Moss’ who finds that the North American readers’

744 Nilufer E. Bharucha, Rohinton Mistry: Ethnic Enclosures and Transcultural Spaces (Jaipur: Rawat

Publications, 2003), pp. 166-67.

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uncomplicated equating of this novel with nineteenth-century realism is wrong.745 She

rightly ‘rescues’ the novel from such ‘neo-imperialist’ misreadings. But then she sends

it into another brand of essentialism by saying that Mistry should be read in the Indian

realist tradition. As I have been arguing throughout the thesis, in the same way that

there is no pattern of nineteenth-century realism, the Indian realist tradition is too

wide, diverse, and layered to be considered a coherent pattern. Mistry’s realism can

be compared to a whole body of writers with diverse class, caste, gender, and religious

affiliations. There is also hardly a pattern of postcolonial realism. It may be true that

postcolonial writers are born with the same sense of historical crisis where forces of

colonialism are the operative tools, and that they can feel the same paradox between

the disillusionment of the present and the anticipation for a better future. As a result

of this, there may be certain realist styles and modes that are favoured by multiple

regions for the purpose of talking back to the colonial empire. But these styles and

modes are fundamentally shaped by the specific historical conjuncture which their

writings address as well as by the side of ideological spectrum (shaped by values of

class/caste/race/gender, etc.) that the writers are on. Peter Morey grasps this fully

when reading ‘the eruption of the symbolic, the satirical, the allegorical and the

carnivalesque’ in the novel, he writes: ‘Mistry is here developing a more stylised and

syncretic way of representing the world than the conventional critical view, which sees

him simply as a realist writer, would allow’.746 However, he does not historicise

Mistry’s realism in his syncretic reading. A writer writing to a specific conjuncture

manufactured by a long historical crisis and an immediate catastrophic event will

adopt a mode that is specific to the orientation and nature of the event. Not only are

the realist modes between Devi and Mistry or between Mistry and Sahgal different, in

fact, a careful study can show that even the realist modes in Mistry’s Such a Long

Journey (based on the two Indian wars with China and with West Pakistan) and Family

Matters (based loosely on the Babri masjid demolition and the rise of Hindu

fundamentalism) are differing, if not entirely different.747 Until we tease out the

specific historical conjunctures and how they shape the choice of mode, a drive to find

745 Laura Moss, ‘Can Rohinton Mistry’s Realism Rescue the Novel?’, in Postcolonising the

Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture, ed. by Rowland Smith (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid

Laurier University Press, 2000), pp. 157-65. 746 Peter Morey, Rohinton Mistry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 98. 747 Mistry, Such a Log Journey (London: Faber & Faber, 1991); Family Matters (London: Faber &

Faber, 2003).

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a pattern in writers may seem unfounded. The symbol of the quilt, to return to the

episode one final time, is where Mistry stresses that the question is not one of

authenticity in representation, but of foresight and acute study of the hierarchical,

composite nature of Indian society. His style of narration reminds one of the British

Marxist historians of the 1960s, such as E. P. Thomson, George Rudé, Eric

Hobsbawm, and others, who in a strongly political task attempted to retrieve the

histories of the oppressed, the weak, the disenfranchised, the working classes, and the

people through reading their diaries, memoirs, accounts, etc. Their project is widely

known as the ‘history from below’.748 In Mistry’s historical and sympathetic

engagement with the minority scenario of the emergency, and in his task of supplying

voice to the unsaid and the unuttered, he appears to write a minor account of realism,

or a realism from below.

In this chapter, I noted how the emergency was diversely represented in fiction.

The authors took the language of bodily oppression, class, and caste to understand the

horrors of the event, giving their narrative form a realist strain. But they also mobilised

a number of modes to adequately represent the emergency conditions. These modes

are not always analytical. I argued that Rushdie’s use of magic is descriptive, while

the two other modes of grotesque and mythic – which together constitute the

framework of extra-realism – critique the emergency and situate a reading of solidarity

and resistance from below. I also argued that the relative distance from the event by

these writers might also have occasioned the choice of different modes. In Sahgal’s

and in Mistry’s use of emergency realism, which we read as critical realist, we found

a cogent critique of the emergency conditions and a horizon of transformative

possibilities. Sahgal uses the realist devices of irony and satire to represent the dark

sides of the emergency measures. She also mobilises a gender-based critique through

the uses of memoir and memory, through which she shifts the focus from a bleak

realisation of the present to a long history of cross-cultural exchanges and practices of

cosmopolitanism in India. We also argued that such a perspective is thoroughly upper

class-based, making Sahgal’s realism into a realism from above. Mistry’s realist

critique of the emergency reverses the angle of perspective. He uses socio-

748 See E. P. Thompson, Thompson, E. P., ‘History from Below’, in The Essential E. P. Thompson,

ed. by Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 2001), pp. 481-489; see also, History from Below:

Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. by Frederick Krantz

(Montreal: Concordia university Press, 1985).

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economically minor characters who do not always understand what the emergency is

but whose lives are largely determined by its effects. His critique is forwarded through

the sarcastic and plural subaltern consciousness, as well as through a narrator who is

deeply sympathetic to the characters. The transformative possibility in Mistry appears

in the end, when we realise that despite having superhuman powers, despite disabling

these characters’ bodies and professions, the emergency has not been able to destroy

the community of these characters, their sense of comradeship, and their love for each

other. The desire to live socially in a community, enduring all obstacles, is eternal in

humans.

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Conclusion

In the end, let me quickly note some of the points raised in the thesis. I have argued

that the concept of modernity, in the Indian context, is deeply linked with the processes

of world-wide colonial- and capitalist modernisation. Since colonialism and

imperialism are global by nature, modernity too assumes a global character. At the

same time, modernity is also shaped crucially by the specificities of historical

conjuncture. I have contended that in order to understand this coeval character of

(post)colonial modernity, an approach is needed that studies the global, uneven, and

long nature of historical crisis in postcolonial India. I have chosen three catastrophic

events from the late-colonial and postcolonial periods – the 1943-44 Bengal famine,

the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the state of emergency (1975-1977).

Taking from Veena Das and Louis Althusser, I have shown how these catastrophic

events form a dialectic with the long historical crisis of modernity in India. I have also

argued that these three events, despite all being conditioned by agrarian and industrial

crises in colonial and postcolonial India, are different from one another in nature, form,

and orientation and give rise to different kinds of victim communities and politics.

My main contention in the thesis has been that novels that register these events

are able to capture the dialectic between events and crisis in their use of form and

mode. While form is the shape-giving factor, mode is what gives form its particularity.

Modes are chosen by socially committed writers to analyse and uncover the historical

forces operating behind catastrophic events, to address the specificities of their nature

and orientation, and to convey the specific geographical impact and the local cultural

reception of the events. The events generated from colonialism and imperialism may

all be global-historical in nature, but they do not produce the same kinds of impact or

artistic expression everywhere. Modes respond to these historical specificities by their

analytical components and by their local, aesthetic, linguistic and cultural mediations.

Because modes are also reflections of the processes of artistic production – often in

the question of which mode is adequate and why – they can further capture the

processes of mediation as well. Moreover, in a catastrophe-based work, there is often

a juxtaposition of different modes, and sometimes this juxtaposition may feature two

apparently contrasting modes (for example, the fantastic and the social realist). They

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are mobilised to capture the puzzle and the horror brought by an event, and to analyse

the catastrophic situation. They may be also used because socially committed writers

tend to deploy a utopian transformative future in their content as a means to redeem

the bleak present. In short, modes are historically determined, locally shaped, self-

reflexive, and essentially heterogeneous. Because of this heterogeneity, the novels that

attempt to represent the critical historical conjunctures of a catastrophe realistically

are essentially heterogeneous, experimental, and modernistic in form. I have called

this literary framework of postcolonial modernity ‘crisis realism’.

In my three chapters, I have then gone on to test out my propositions regarding

crisis realism. In the second chapter, I have taken up the case of the 1943 Bengal

famine. I have argued that the disaster was produced by a long crisis in agriculture and

industry, and also by the immediate contexts of the Second World War, failure of the

Indian oceanic monsoon, the operation of speculative capital, and anti-colonial

agitations. I have showed how Bhabani Bhattacharya uses an analytical mode

comprising both an expert analysis of the famine and an ethnographic documentation

of the disaster. He also captures the specificity of the crisis through the use of an

affective mode, fusing elements of melodrama and sensation and making use of local

linguistic and cultural expressions. This combined analytical-affective mode is

different from Kamala Markandaya’s memoir-driven, social realist mode of scarcity

and hunger. Amalendu Chakraborty’s metafictional mode, I have argued, is uniquely

sensitive to the socio-historical processes through which the famine became

transformed into chronic malnutrition This mode is different from both Markandaya’s

and Bhattacharya’s, but bears many similarities with Bhattacharya’s for the common

context of the Bengal famine and for the immensely experimental use of realism.

In the third chapter, I have read four novels by Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun

Bhattacharya respectively, in order to understand how they have represented peasant

experience and the social conditions of the urban poor in the contexts of insurgency

and state reprisal. I have also showed that international events such as Mao Zedong’s

‘cultural revolution’ had a major impact in Bengal. Because of the violent nature of

the movement and the predominantly conservative discourses of urban society and

urban media, the Naxal insurgency was portrayed primarily as a product of terroristic

or ‘romantic’ inclinations of the urban youth. I have argued how Mahasweta Devi

points out this propagandist misreading of the situation in two of her novels through

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the use of a quest mode, in which her protagonists set out to find out about the murder

of their son or the disappearance of a friend. This mode is built through a one-day

narrative that uses an expansive temporality and that historicises the event with the

help of narrative features such as the dialectic between linear plot and non-linear

action time, the connection between dreams and memory, an exceptionally

interventionist narrator, and the trope of the reappearance of the ‘dead’ Naxalite/tribal

insurgent character. Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novels render the transformation of the

lumpenproletariat of the Naxalite period into a fraction of the urban poor, the work-

force for the consumerist bourgeoisie in the postcolonial metropolis. Bhattacharya

mobilises an urban fantastic mode through which he situates the historical link

between the Naxalite guerrilla insurgency and the irreal guerrilla warfare by

Calcutta’s urban poor. The arrangement and counter-utilisation of the urban space are

instrumental in Bhattacharya’s use of fantasy, which takes up a class-based character

and a utopian spirit.

In the fourth and final chapter, I have shown how novelists have registered the

state of emergency under Indira Gandhi’s government. I have argued that writers have

mainly used extra-realist and critical realist modes to represent the violence, torture,

and horror of the emergency. The extra-realist framework is composed respectively of

magical, grotesque, and mythical modes in the works of Salman Rushdie, O V

Vijayan, and Arun Joshi, and is named thus because of its exploitation of the realist

discourses of class struggle and bodily oppression. But this framework is different

from the critical irrealist framework of Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya in

its lack of historical, critical, and analytical components. The critical realist mode is

analytical and forceful, but the element of critique is qualified by the writers’ class-

and caste-based perspectives. Nayantara Sahgal uses a deeply analytical narrative

accompanied by the historically specific use of time and cosmopolitanism – a

perspective which is predominantly upper class and liberal. Rohinton Mistry uses a

minority perspective to understand the impact the emergency has on the poor, the

lower castes, and the socio-religious minorities, who together, paradoxically enough,

represent the bulk of the population of India. This minority perspective however is

mobilised by a socio-economically privileged writer and not a lower-caste or Dalit

writer. Thus, I have called Mistry’s use of realism a realism from below, and Sahgal’s,

correspondingly, a realism from above.

246

I would like, finally, to make two brief observations on the continuity of crisis

in India and on postcolonial realism. Like its temporally-marked beginning, Mistry’s

A Fine Balance also ends in a historically specific time period, i.e. in 1984 as Maneck

returns from Dubai to attend his father’s funeral. On his way home, he is told by a

Sikh taxi driver that since the assassination of Indira Gandhi, there has been routine

violence against the Sikhs and others: ‘for ordinary people, nothing has changed.

Government still keeps breaking poor people’s homes and jhopadpattis. In villages

they still dig wells only if so many sterilizations are done. They tell farmers they will

get fertilizers only after nusbandhi is performed. Living each day is to face one

emergency or another’.749 Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards following her

Operation Blue Star campaign, during which the Indian army was deployed to remove

separatist Sikh militants from the holy site of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The

decades of 1980s and early 1990s were marked by violent religion- or ethnicity-based

separatist movements in various regions of India. These movements were led by

people whose fate did not change much in the aftermath of decolonisation in India,

and who have continued to suffer economic neglect and from socio-religious

marginalisation in the increasingly ‘Hindu’ India. Although these movements were

brutally suppressed by the Indian armed forces, the political tensions in these regions

continue to exist today, and a permanent emergency marks the lives of the people

implicated.

1984 was also the year when one of the worst industrial disasters in history

occurred in Bhopal due to the systematic degradation of the safety of workers in the

factory owned by the U.S.-based multi-national chemical company Union Carbide.

Around four thousand people were killed and another half a million were injured. The

toxic gas leakage more than thirty years ago continues to affect life in the region. The

door to neo-colonialism that Gandhi’s emergency had opened only widened with time,

and this widening pushed the government to liberalise the economy in 1991. In the

two decades since then, liberalisation and globalisation in India have been marked by

a conspicuous rise of consumerism and a new urban middle class, an unprecedented

disparity in wealth and poverty, a systematic dismantling of small scale industries,

gross abuse of the environment, rise in aggressive nationalism, and by increasing cases

of caste and sexual violence. In rural India, they have been marked specifically by an

749 Mistry, Balance, p. 581.

247

entrenchment in class and caste and the tragic phenomenon of farmers’ suicides.

Although Amalendu Chakraborty’s novel, Ākāler Sandhāne, shows that famine has

transformed into chronic malnutrition and starvation in the 1980s postcolonial Bengal,

the journalist P. Sainath tells us in his survey of India’s rural societies in Everybody

Loves a Good Drought (2000) that famine, starvation, social oppression, and farmer

suicide have continued to ravage the Indian rural sectors.750 As India shifts to a ‘service

sector’ based economy, crisis in agriculture, environment, and society will only

intensify. At this critical conjuncture, it is imperative for us to choose another set of

events and another set of literary works from the immediate past and to attempt to

uncover the wide nature of socio-historical crisis surrounding the country’s

postcolonial present. For this, we will have to tackle the question of conjuncture (i.e.

multiple contexts and their determinants).

This brings me to the second observation on postcolonial realism. After long

being neglected by scholars in postcolonial studies, realism has finally begun to be

taken into consideration as an object of critical enquiry. A number of recent

monographs have addressed the nuanced and complex uses of literary realism in

novels about postcolonial India, Somalia, Indonesia, or other contexts.751 There have

also been attempts to develop a framework for postcolonial realism by mobilising the

paradigm of world-systems theory and by exploring the systemic nature of crisis in

literary works by writers from the (semi- or global) peripheries.752 In Realism, Form

and the Postcolonial Novel, Nicholas Robinette writes,

[D]ictatorship, apartheid, and diaspora do not provide the same conditions of

knowing as does citizenship in a liberal democracy. The freedom to observe

social life, to collect data, to move through the various zones of economic,

political, and cultural force – nothing guarantees these as a human right. Such

power has frequently enough been stripped from the public and allocated to

the state. Where then can the writer conduct their work of observation and

mapping? Whether we speak of Suss laws or apartheid, the disappeared or the

750 P Sainath, Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts (New Delhi:

Penguin, 2000). 751 See Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2010), pp. 1-44; Eli Park Sorensen, Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory,

Interpretation and the Novel (London: Palgrave, 2010); Ulka Anjaria, Realism; Hamish Dalley, The

Postcolonial Historical Novel: Realism, Allegory, and the Representation of Contested Pasts (London:

Palgrave, 2014); see also the recent issues on global and world realism in the journals Novel and Modern

Language Quarterly, which I have cited in Chapter One. 752 Nicholas Robinette, Realism, Form and the Postcolonial Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2014);

Warwick Research Collective, Uneven and Combined Development: Towards a New Theory of World-

Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).

248

diasporic, politics and social practice frequently undermine the basic

conditions of realist writing.753

I agree with these observations. It is important to understand the historical conditions

of, say, (post)colonialism in India, and how these conditions shape the specific forms

of production and articulation of knowledge. It is also important to build a framework

of postcolonial realism under which a number of writers from diverse geographies,

who have responded to the historical conditions of colonialism, are studied, in order

to understand the global nature and impact of (post)colonial conditions. At the same

time, it is vital to address the various sub-conditions that the historical condition of

postcolonialism has given birth to India, and to mark the social, geographical, and

political heterogeneities between writers who represent these conditions. These

heterogeneities are shaped by the uniquely specific conjunctures from which they

write, or, in the Sartrean sense, by their ‘situations’. It is crucial to ask: What kinds of

realism do their works offer, and why are they different from each other? Then, there

are questions of whether there are further developments in a realist form that registers

a specific historical condition within postcolonialism, say the Naxalite insurgency in

the contemporary works of Jhumpa Lahiri and Neel Mukherjee. Why does Lahiri use

a diasporic mode for the imaginative reconstruction of the period? Why is Neel

Mukherjee interested in using the mode of diary writing by a young Naxalite? What

ideological and social values are implicated in their narratives? And how do they

respond to or differ from the quest mode in Devi’s Naxalite novels? There may also

be another set of specificities concerning the different modes used by the same writer

to respond to the same historical condition (for instance, tribal life and issues in

postcolonial India as seen from the perspectives of a middle class, upper caste, male

or female character and from a tribal himself or herself in Devi’s fiction, say in

Operation? - Bashai Tudu and in Chotti Munda and His Arrow, respectively). What

all these sets and subsets of questions suggest is that if we undertake to construct an

analytical category – Robinette’s ‘systematic’ reading for instance – that is able to

capture the geo-historical shaping of postcolonial realism, then we will have to

carefully address the relevant social, geographical, historical, and political

contingencies and determinants. One way to approach this task, as I have attempted to

753 Robinette, Realism, p. 6.

249

do in this thesis, is to interrogate how the general is both implicated within the specific

and influenced by it. This, I think, is where a study of the historically and culturally

specific use of modes will be instrumental.

250

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